Phabricator: All repositories registered - upcoming workflow changes

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Tuesday January 31 2017 20:10:42 Luigi Toscano wrote:

>> It will be a complete shutdown of Reviewboard - we'll be archiving it
>> in the event for some reason it becomes necessary to access the data
>> it stores.
>
>Isn't it a way to change the site in static website and keep it alive?
>Checking the history of a review can tell a lot. Also for discarded reviews.

I'd vote for that too, because

>> In most cases mailing lists should have the history of reviews in
>> their archives, so those will continue to be accessible through list
>> archives in the long run.

That is true for the reviews, but not for the patches themselves. In my experience you get at most the extract reviewers commented on, and that was usually only a single line.

It can also be very useful to look at older versions of reviews. That kind of history isn't available elsewhere, at least not without significant digging around.
What also doesn't help is the fact that the email notifications that are archived via mailing lists each contain a big part if not the entire review/comment history.

Keeping the website alive as a read-only resource also makes it possible to download patchfiles and other resources that were added to reviews (which are *not* available via mailing list archives).
And last but not least: knowing myself I'm quite likely (and surely not the only one) to forget transfering open reviews to Phabricator before the transition is supposed to be final. 

In fact, even if no one forgets a single outstanding RR until it's too late, are we supposed to copy all review comments, or are reviewers supposed to take to mailing list archives to consult the review history? Both options aren't really acceptable if you ask me so unless there's an automatic transfer+conversion process this seems like an important argument to keep the reviewboard site around.

R.