This is an RFC to migrate code-review from Gerrit to Phabricator's Differential.
Full RFC on mediawiki.org:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Migrate_code_review_and_management_to_Phabricator_from_Gerrit
Plan as it relates to WMF RelEng's quarterly goals:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Project/Differential_Migration
(just a team/goal planning document, but it helps get an idea of the steps/overall plan)
Removing myself as assignee to (hopefully) reduce confusion about what the "shepherd" role is about (TechCom now uses column on the TechCom-Has-shepherd board to communicate shepherd information)
No:
By now, I'm not sure whether it's really "we can't commit time to this currently" (=stalled) or "we decided to stay on gerrit for now and are not sure if that's ever going to change" (= declined) though.
We're (RelEng) going to talk about this at our team offsite (post DevSummit/All hands, the week of the 29th). I'll give a summary of that discussion here.
This really needs reviewing, as Gerrit is a huge barrier to entry for new developers. See the summary for T165208 (marked as a duplicate of this ticket) for just some of the problems that discourage contributions.
Seriously, so long as Gerrit is being used, you are actively discouraging participation.
It's not as big of a a barrier to contribution as you think. Generally, when I want to commit something on a project hosted by WMF, I push a commit to somewhere else like Github, and then ask someone else who understands Gerrit to merge it. Usually, this is the extension developer, and from there they can either do git remote add or download a patch file.
@HappyDog Gerrit is a lot easier then differential as gerrit dosent force you to use a tool to contribute. Gerrit includes a inline editor where as differential dosen’t.
If you think gerrit is hard for new users, could you file a task in Gerrit please with an explementation on why it’s hard and if you have any ideas on how it could be resolved. I can then upstream the task.
@HappyDog is it the UI that’shard? If so gerrit’s is getting a new ui
And how do you handle the review process. Take a look at my description in T165208 - even locating the button to add a comment is difficult!
@HappyDog is it the UI that’shard? If so gerrit’s is getting a new ui
I think it's just the UI, but because the UI is so bad it is hard to tell whether there are also underlying issues. I expect not, and that it is just a UI problem.
What is the timeline on the new UI? Has anyone seen any mock-ups or work-in-progress yet? Is it likely to solve the usability issues, or is it just a cosmetic dusting on top of what is currently there?
I remember taking a look at a 'new UI' back in May (as linked to from this comment, though the link is now dead), and it seemed like an incremental step that didn't address a lot of the fundamental UI issues, but perhaps things have developed since then.
Please move "me too" / "UI bad" / "UI good" / "I don't like XYZ" / "+1!"s on Gerrit or Phabricator to the talk page on-wiki instead of posting them here. Thanks.
But then again, I find it hard to take you seriously when you dismiss the new UI as "not massively full of whelm." Concrete issues ("this thing is hard to find/do", "when I try to X, I can't") are solvable and upstream-able. Vague complaints like "UI/UX is ugly, scrap it, Oh btw ever heard of Github?" are completely useless (and borderline condescending).
I remember taking a look at a 'new UI' back in May (as linked to from this comment, though the link is now dead), and it seemed like an incremental step that didn't address a lot of the fundamental UI issues, but perhaps things have developed since then.
Well 6 months ago it was so incomplete as to be basically unusable. So I think you'll want to give it a fresh trial run once we upgrade--then see where we stand. We'll want to reassess any UI/UX related bugs that have already been filed. Some will be solved outright--some may be differently broken now.
Apologies if you found my comments condescending. That was not the intention.
I find it hard to take you seriously when you dismiss the new UI as "not massively full of whelm."
I'm not really sure how this differs from your description of the UI as "basically unusable", aside from being phrased in a more colloquial fashion (which, in a global forum such as this, was probably a mistake). However, we seem to agree on the basic point, that what was being proposed at that time was not fit for purpose.
Concrete issues ... are solvable ... Vague complaints like "UI/UX is ugly" are completely useless.
I did include some concrete issues, but really this is not the forum for getting into the detail. The issues are systemic and require an upstream UI overhaul, not a bunch of individual requests to 'move button x' or 'improve icon y'.
The 'new UI' that was linked to 6 months ago was - as you say - unusable, which really didn't bode well. I will be interested in seeing the finished implementation to see whether it has made a difference. If so, maybe the fix to T165208 would simply be to upgrade, which would be great!
As for the current version of Gerrit being ugly - well, that's subjective of course, but I would question the taste of anyone who picked it out of a beauty contest between Github, Phabricator and even - why not - Bugzilla. :-)
@HappyDog this is what it will eventually look like https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17q-ygGioZi_5DITLyELa8oaOr22e15AHy8cq6XTZ0nY/edit#slide=id.g27f16618ec_0_139
Also this is a rewrite of the ui, it is done in javascript and html. It's based on polymer which youtube uses.
The ui is alot more usable from 2.15+.
In retrospect, "it must not be ugly" is a terrible criteria for software selection :P
@HappyDog i've brought the discussion to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/conpherence/637/
TechCom wonders what to do with this. Can we drop it from the RFC process? Or close it?
(was about to close as well, here's what I was writing)
For a variety of reasons, this RfC will not be moving forward as structured. There's no current plans for a migration from Gerrit to Differential. If the project were to spark up again, it would benefit from a new RfC with fresh perspectives
(+ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Migrate_code_review_and_management_to_Phabricator_from_Gerrit , https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Project/Differential_Migration , https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Migration_Timeline might welcome updates.)
Some of them are worth retaining. The project should be archived yes.
(+ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Migrate_code_review_and_management_to_Phabricator_from_Gerrit , https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Project/Differential_Migration , https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Migration_Timeline might welcome updates.)
Declined the first. Marked second and third as historical.
IMHO the current state is the worst possible outcome. In addition to what we already had for most (gerrit) or some (github) of our repos, we now have a third place for some others (some tools on toolforge, Scap and a few more host their code on diffusion and do code review on differential).
Especially from a new contributors perspective, this is bad. Depending on which project I want to contribute to I now have to familiarise myself with github, gerrit and/or differential. Personally, when I started contributing here about a year ago, I didn't know about any of those and wouldn't have cared which one to learn. But by now, I had to dig into differential as well as gerrit, because I wanted to contribute to different projects over time.
This is an acceptable state for a (gerrit->differential) transition period. It isn't when the transition was declined. One can argue a lot about whether gerrit or differential fits our purpose better (which was done) - but I hardly can imagine how keeping both isn't much worse than having either of them.
tl;dr: The migration gerrit->differential being declined and gerrit being supposed to stay around, we should consider to shutdown differential and migrate existing projects from there to gerrit.
Not sure whether this is the right place to start that discussion, probably not. Feel free to move it to wherever seems more appropriate.
It's at T191182 now. But maybe it should go on some mailing list. Or some wiki discussion page. An answer that includes where to put it instead would've been more helpful.