Feature matrix for future infrastructure

[Thomas Lübking]

Sorry, not fast enough away from the Ctrl key.



On Freitag, 23. Januar 2015 15:21:34 CEST, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

> Gerrit is just a kind of reviewboard with a git integration, phabricator is a whole integrated development platform.


> And, apart from detail-by-detail comparisons, gerrit would be an exceedingly bad choice for a community like KDE, with its enormous diversity of skill levels. Gerrit is uninviting and complicated.
That's actually nonsense.
It's as complicated as git - the only additions are the git hook to automatically add Change-Id's [1] and the "magic" refs/for/foobar branch which triggers as review.

Git has a pretty steep learning curve, though - that's correct. But it is also the SCM KDE uses (and it's not like hg would be simpler)
Git is also not to be dropped w/ phabricator (I assume) and actually, phabricator will introduce "yet another tool" to use and mix up with git commands.

> There is no way an artist who has a nice patch for Krita is ever going to be able to inducted into becoming a Krita developer if they have to follow
> instructions like this:
> 
> https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Gerrit
If you had followed the discussion or at least looked at that feature matrix Milian started and that you liked to high-handedly deem as rubbish, you'd have noticed that webfrontends to upload patches (like suggested https://tools.wmflabs.org/gerrit-patch-uploader/) are available to follow a "download tarball, edit, diff files by hand and upload the patch" workflow.

The reason that this is not the suggested approach in the techbase article is likely, that it is an incredibly inefficient approach that contradicts the very basic idea of SCM.

> But gerrit is not the answer to the question "what should our future infrastructure be", because it's only a replacement for reviewboard.

That is correct, but does not imply Phabricator would be.
It has no history on CI, the bug about loosing metainfo with on-behalf commits was finally commented by the assigned dev by "I don't care about this feature" and - talking about integration - it's bugtracker eg. does apparently not support suggesting duplicates [1] and is claimed to be a a11y problem [2] - while the latter is at least being worked on.

The bottom line is that while gerrit has limited scope and could ever only be a part of an integrated solution, there's yet to be proven that Phabricator can even be "just" a sufficient SCM/Review or bugtracking tool.

If it can, great. But right now, I've heard far more about what it's supposed to be than what it is.
And that is a problem, as it schedules any efforts for change to an uncertain point in the future ("When it's done")

Cheers,
Thomas

[1] https://secure.phabricator.com/T4828
[2] https://secure.phabricator.com/T4843