[HN Gopher] Phacility Is Winding Down, Phabricator No Longer Act...
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       Phacility Is Winding Down, Phabricator No Longer Actively
       Maintained
        
       Author : carwyn
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2021-05-29 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (admin.phacility.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (admin.phacility.com)
        
       | Aeolun wrote:
       | This post about shuttering operations is quite devoid of reasons.
       | I can't imagine customers would be happy about that.
        
       | geuis wrote:
       | Phabricator is used at some very large companies like Pinterest.
       | It's easily the best general purpose tools of its kind I've used.
       | I won't be surprised if management gets picked up by someone
       | soon.
        
       | smitty1e wrote:
       | "Phabricator is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application."
        
         | dmitriid wrote:
         | So?
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | So this post has absolutely zero context.
        
             | smitty1e wrote:
             | Try to give it some, get mod bombed. So it goes.
        
               | lima wrote:
               | You got downvoted the boring way.
        
               | iamcreasy wrote:
               | I think what this application does add more context than
               | its tech stack.
        
       | 01100011 wrote:
       | Too bad. Phabricator was a great tool for handling various
       | aspects of a software project(SCM integration, task tracking,
       | messaging, code reviews, etc). I used it on a couple of projects
       | and it seemed to work very well.
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | Not familiar with it, but their installation guide is one of the
       | best I've ever seen.
        
       | saurik wrote:
       | Phabricator had seemed to be the only good product in this space
       | when I had looked; what are people even using instead? (I guess
       | they just put up with GitHub :/.)
        
         | axk wrote:
         | Gerrit is solid: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/
        
           | Jonanin wrote:
           | The UI is atrocious, unfortunately.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | lima wrote:
             | Check again - it got a serious makeover recently. It's
             | still far from intutive, but so much better than it used to
             | be.
             | 
             | It's a power user tool that has a slight learning curve.
        
           | kemayo wrote:
           | Gerrit is good, if opinionated in ways that we have to put
           | work into onboarding for. That said, it only covers a small
           | subset of what Phabricator does -- it's missing the entire
           | issue tracker part, most importantly.
        
           | lima wrote:
           | Ack! Recently moved from Phabricator to Gerrit and deleting
           | Arcanist was a plus.
        
           | geraldcombs wrote:
           | It'd be nice if it had a tightly integrated issue tracker and
           | CI.
        
           | JoshTriplett wrote:
           | Does it still desperately want you to squash all your
           | patches, or does it do a good job of handling an ordered
           | stack of patches these days?
        
             | lima wrote:
             | It does an excellent job handling stacks! You may be
             | mistaking it for Phabricator, which defaults to squashing.
        
               | kemayo wrote:
               | I suspect that JoshTriplett is complaining about the
               | `amend` workflow required to update a single gerrit patch
               | with revisions.
               | 
               | If you're used to the GitHub pull request style, you'd be
               | more likely to make a small commit and add it to the
               | request. In gerrit that approach results in a separate
               | patch for review, which isn't what such a person would
               | want.
               | 
               | (Personally, I've come to appreciate gerrit's model for
               | strongly encouraging building patches that are
               | encapsulated single-reviewable-changes, in a way that
               | lends itself to never having a commit that'd break the
               | build if you landed on it e.g. during a git bisect....
               | But it's also something that surprises people who've not
               | used gerrit before, in my experience.)
        
         | Hamuko wrote:
         | Most of the stuff that Phabricator was used at our company is
         | now done in (self-hosted) Gitlab. I think the only thing that's
         | still actively there is credential management, and I can only
         | imagine there are better solutions for that than Phabricator.
        
         | woleium wrote:
         | gitlab is good and can still be self hosted
        
       | codeapprove wrote:
       | That's a shame, heard only good things about those tools.
       | 
       | Shameless but timely plug: I'm building a much better code review
       | tool for teams on GitHub. Check out https://codeapprove.com and
       | if you're interested to hear more just email me (sam at habosa
       | dot com).
        
         | lima wrote:
         | Reviewable is another similar review improvement tool for
         | GitHub: https://reviewable.io
         | 
         | ...or just use Gerrit[1], which can do everything these do out
         | of the box, and has a much nicer workflow than GitHub once you
         | got over the learning curve.
         | 
         | [1]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com
        
       | carwyn wrote:
       | Slightly more here:
       | https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2021.22/
       | 
       | Shame, the code review was good and one of the few that supported
       | task dependencies :(
        
       | ZuLuuuuuu wrote:
       | Is there a summary of why this product is not maintained anymore?
       | From time to time I would hear about Phabricator, but I didn't
       | know that the project was in trouble.
        
         | woleium wrote:
         | I'd guess it's not profitable for them?
        
       | abbe98 wrote:
       | I always had a good experience with Phabricator, especially its
       | customization/dashboards.
       | 
       | Wikimedia still uses it[1].
       | 
       | [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/
        
       | nine_k wrote:
       | To clarify: this applies not just to phabricator-dot-com, but
       | Phabricator the software:
       | https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/9ceb66453501...
       | 
       | This is unexpected. Many companies, among them as well-resourced
       | as Facebook, use Phabricator. I wonder if it will be forked soon
       | by some party interested in keeping it around. OTOH it looks like
       | none such party exists, because the public sources have not been
       | updated literally for years. Maybe everyone interested just runs
       | their private fork :(
       | 
       | Phabricator should be reasonably easy to self-host anyway.
        
         | iamcreasy wrote:
         | I think Blender and KDE uses Phabricator as well.
        
           | solarkraft wrote:
           | KDE has been in the process switching away (to Gitlab) for a
           | while.
        
         | rachelbythebay wrote:
         | FB's phabricator went its own way long ago. I imagine this has
         | exactly zero impact on their day to day.
         | 
         | Put it this way: the last time I saw it, they still had the
         | "clowncopterize" button. Try finding that anywhere else.
        
         | lima wrote:
         | > _This is unexpected._
         | 
         | They've been down to only one developer (Evan himself) for a
         | while. Still sad :(
         | 
         | https://secure.phabricator.com/differential/query/all/
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | Man, in my opinion, in software, things don't really get started
       | until after surviving for about 10 years or so. Everything else
       | is fleeting.
       | 
       | Quite nice to see it saw 11 years, though.
        
       | bogota wrote:
       | I got to meet evan once when i was in SF. Phabricator was one of
       | a few pieces of software that actually brought me joy when using.
       | I will always miss the diff review process now that my current
       | company is moving from phabricator to github and i'll be unlikely
       | to ever use it at a company again with this update.
       | 
       | Thanks Evan for all the work you have put in over the years. Some
       | of my biggest learnings as an engineer have been from reading and
       | interacting with you on the phabricator secure server and reading
       | your code when extending phab for companies.
        
       | kludgeoldfart wrote:
       | Phuck
        
       | evilelectron wrote:
       | Sad news indeed :(
        
       | ferdowsi wrote:
       | Whoa. Really, really disappointed about this. The Phabricator
       | approach to reviews and merges was incredibly impactful on a
       | previous team. It encouraged discipline and an informative main
       | branch that was always linked to reviews, and free of commits
       | like "fixing lint errors" and "actually fix lint errors, for
       | real".
       | https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recom...
       | 
       | The task management system isn't bad either, considering how weak
       | Github's is and how bloated JIRA is.
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-29 23:00 UTC)