Changes to our Git infrastructure

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 5 Jan 2015, at 10:40, Jan Kundrát wrote:

> On Monday, 5 January 2015 16:23:15 CEST, Thomas Lübking wrote:
>> To sum up my understanding:
>> - Nobody wants to install/use PHP (or, good god, .NET/Mono ;-) on a 
>> client.
>> - Nobody remotely intends to *require* this (but one can oc. *offer* 
>> tools written on any whatsoever exotic requirement)
>
> Phabricator has an equivalent of rbtools/rbt called Arcanist which is 
> written in PHP. There are AFAIK no other tools for automating working 
> with Phabricator's code review subsystem.

No, but it's all API driven so you are free to write whatever tools you 
may like.

> I claim that requiring PHP or JVM or .NET for each 
> developers'/contributors' productive work is bad.

I claim that "apt-get install php5-cli" is not any more difficult than 
any other package installations developers may have to perform. Since 
you brought up Java, if we were talking about a Java tool, I would make 
the same claim about "apt-get install (your pick of default-jre, 
default-jre-headless, openjdk-7-jre)". .NET, "apt-get install 
mono-runtime".

> Jeff's response is that PHP is not really required because they can 
> just juggle patches by hand and paste them to web interfaces or pipe 
> to `git am`. While this is technically correct, I find this logic 
> misleading

So is your characterization of my claims. For one, I've never said 
anything about juggling patches by hand or piping to "git am", only 
about web interfaces.

You have claimed that for the occasional contributor with one to two 
patches a year that installing such a tool is onerous. I disagree with 
that, but regardless, I've said that submitting patches via a web 
interface should be perfectly fine for such occasional contributors and 
that those that will want the power of the CLI tool are likely to be 
more advanced developers/contributors -- who I don't believe would find 
the setup of such a tool to be difficult or onerous.

I do not claim that in a Phabricator world that advanced/regular 
developers would be required to always copy and paste diffs into a web 
UI (and realistically if using the web UI you'd probably save the diff 
to a file and then just upload it). Those that prefer such a workflow 
could use it. Those that don't -- and that don't have unwavering 
language preferences for their tools -- would have command-line options.

> and say that in absence of tools which are on-par with Arcanist, PHP 
> is effectively required, and I do find this situation a downside of 
> Phabricator.

Your hatred of PHP is well noted. I do not feel so strongly as you about 
the languages in which useful tools are written. As I said before, I 
can't speak for the broader KDE development community about that (and I 
doubt you can either).

> I also point out that there are other tools which do not require a 
> client-side PHP script.

Yes, you've made that abundantly clear.

--Jeff