[Reviewers] Recommending Phabricator

[Gregory Szorc]

Reviewers,

I just made some significant changes to
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges to increase
readability and friendliness to new developers. Mostly in the "sending
patches" section.

One of the changes I made was to recommend Phabricator over emailing
patches. I did this because I think Phabricator is more friendly to new
contributors and provides a gateway for new contributors getting more
involved.

A new contributor may not wish to subscribe to the mailing list because of
its volume. Phabricator allows them to use a friendly web interface to mark
up their patches, reply to comments, etc. Unless you have lived in mailing
list development before, it is a foreign concept and difficult to do things
right. I think Phabricator is much easier for people to use, especially if
they are coming from GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. Plus, from a new contributor
perspective, it's easier to follow the state of the patch, as Phabricator
updates automatically when it is committed.

Furthermore, Phabricator allows users to subscribe to changes relevant to
them. For example, https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/H13 is a subscription
from Kevin Cox for all Rust changes. This facilitates drive-by reviews from
casual contributors (Kevin already commented on that base85 Rust review
because he was subscribed to it). Supporting these kinds of interactions
without having to subscribe to the fire hose of the mailing list is good
for the project.

But I know recommending Phabricator on the wiki may be controversial. So I
wanted to tell people so we can have a discussion here if needed.

In addition, I think the time has come for more of Mercurial's core
contributors to transition from email to Phabricator.

I do still have some minor nits with Phabricator. But I find the workflow
much more pleasant. The ability to expand file context and look at diff
coloring when reviewing is terrific. I also love how the stack tracking
feature makes it easy to land a series of commits piecemeal. This enables
forward progress to be made without resulting in confusing [PATCH X of Y]
mismatches on the mailing list. We get notifications for commits when they
are made (you don't have to send an email when you queue) and the
Phabricator status is updated automatically.

As a reviewer, I've noticed I'm biasing to looking at Phabricator first
then falling back to Patchwork if I still want to do reviews. Phabricator
is just a more pleasant experience for me as both a reviewer and a
contributor.

I'd like to encourage the people on this list still using email/pushgate to
transition to Phabricator. And I think we should consider pushing other
contributors to transition as well.

Thoughts?
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