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Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its h

Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use. Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.

spicyj 12y ago
GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear of spamming people's inboxes. When someone updates a PR, it's hard to see what's changed since the last version you saw. Phabricator also has other niceties like syntax highlighting within diffs, two-column diffs (which admittedly GitHub added about a month ago), and a solid command-line tool ("arc") for sending off reviews, etc.
- chralieboy 12y ago
  GitHub does have the ability to assign to (https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-requests-to-other-github-users/ https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-r...) and filter by assignee (https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-requests-by-assignees/ https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-r...). If you want to pull in multiple reviewers, you can @mention them. Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Github has Hub (https://github.com/github/hub https://github.com/github/hub) which is as powerful, if not more so, than arc. The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from.
  - gcb0 12y ago
    I have no idea where that help page took those screen shots from... but it is definitely not from github.com or github enterprise. I see no way to assign pull requests... i don't even see the checkbox they mention on the PR list!
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      That's really odd.. I see it on both the public github and the not completely up-to-date GH-enterprise setup I have access to...
    - frossie 12y ago
      You need to have someone to assign the PR to. Either you need a second contributor on the repo, or you need to be in an organisation with more than one member.
  - spicyj 12y ago
    > Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Yeah, this depends on workflow. We generally send every piece of code to two reviewers but just wait for either one to accept, unless there's a particular reason that both should look at the review. This works well for us but I can see how it wouldn't work as well for people with other processes. > The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from. Yes, Phabricator's isn't perfect but it's the best of the ones I've tried, especially if everyone using it is familiar with the tool and uses it frequently (that is, you might forget to Clowncopterize once or twice ever, but then you'll know for the future). I used to use Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) which had a different approach for emails – they essentially debounce emails to have a half-hour delay and coalesce any emails within that timeframe together, so you get fewer emails but don't need to submit the collection of comments explicitly. Having tried all three choices, I'd say that they're all painful in different ways and I personally prefer Phabricator's approach.
- piotrkaminski 12y ago
  A bit of hopefully useful self-promotion: for those interested in all* of these benefits without ditching GitHub, check out https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io. It has batch comment support (as well as one-off instant send), incremental diffs between revisions (even when rebasing), syntax highlighting in diffs, responsive one- and two-column diffs, and more. And there's no new command-line tools to install and learn -- it hooks right into GitHub. * The review dashboard already shows all the reviews you're involved, but not yet which ones require action. This feature is coming soon -- I have all the data, just need to add some code to massage and display it appropriately.

spicyj 12y ago

GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear of spamming people's inboxes. When someone updates a PR, it's hard to see what's changed since the last version you saw. Phabricator also has other niceties like syntax highlighting within diffs, two-column diffs (which admittedly GitHub added about a month ago), and a solid command-line tool ("arc") for sending off reviews, etc.

chralieboy 12y ago
GitHub does have the ability to assign to (https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-requests-to-other-github-users/ https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-r...) and filter by assignee (https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-requests-by-assignees/ https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-r...). If you want to pull in multiple reviewers, you can @mention them. Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Github has Hub (https://github.com/github/hub https://github.com/github/hub) which is as powerful, if not more so, than arc. The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from.
- gcb0 12y ago
  I have no idea where that help page took those screen shots from... but it is definitely not from github.com or github enterprise. I see no way to assign pull requests... i don't even see the checkbox they mention on the PR list!
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    That's really odd.. I see it on both the public github and the not completely up-to-date GH-enterprise setup I have access to...
  - frossie 12y ago
    You need to have someone to assign the PR to. Either you need a second contributor on the repo, or you need to be in an organisation with more than one member.
- spicyj 12y ago
  > Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Yeah, this depends on workflow. We generally send every piece of code to two reviewers but just wait for either one to accept, unless there's a particular reason that both should look at the review. This works well for us but I can see how it wouldn't work as well for people with other processes. > The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from. Yes, Phabricator's isn't perfect but it's the best of the ones I've tried, especially if everyone using it is familiar with the tool and uses it frequently (that is, you might forget to Clowncopterize once or twice ever, but then you'll know for the future). I used to use Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) which had a different approach for emails – they essentially debounce emails to have a half-hour delay and coalesce any emails within that timeframe together, so you get fewer emails but don't need to submit the collection of comments explicitly. Having tried all three choices, I'd say that they're all painful in different ways and I personally prefer Phabricator's approach.
piotrkaminski 12y ago
A bit of hopefully useful self-promotion: for those interested in all* of these benefits without ditching GitHub, check out https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io. It has batch comment support (as well as one-off instant send), incremental diffs between revisions (even when rebasing), syntax highlighting in diffs, responsive one- and two-column diffs, and more. And there's no new command-line tools to install and learn -- it hooks right into GitHub. * The review dashboard already shows all the reviews you're involved, but not yet which ones require action. This feature is coming soon -- I have all the data, just need to add some code to massage and display it appropriately.