[Reviewers] Recommending Phabricator

[Sean Farley]

Martin von Zweigbergk <martinvonz at google.com> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 9:54 AM Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>>
>
> I agree with all of that. Thanks for updating the wiki and thanks for
> bringing this up.

Can't say much besides I disagree and find myself (in the little free
time I have) only reading the mailing list. It's still a mess to read
phabricator IMHO.
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