The WMF Technical Collaboration team has some FY2015-16 budget available for Phabricator improvements. Let's agree on a sorted list of Phabricator improvements that could be proposed to Phacility Inc (Phabricator maintainers) for their prioritization, and then let's fund those that can be agreed with upstream and fit our budget.
Basic rules of this game:
- Technical Collaboration funds, and therefore the features proposed need to have clear benefit for volunteers.
- Proposals need to be presented in the form of existing or new tasks. Discussions specific to those improvements go to the tasks themselves. Here we discuss prioritization between tasks and other general topics.
- We will not argue with upstream about the convenience of certain improvements. If a proposal fits their roadmap, good. If not, that will be the end of the discussion within the scope of this task.
- This budget needs to be spent within this fiscal year (end of June), and counting back steps this means that we need to make quick decisions. In case of getting stuck in long debates, the TC team will make the last call, say by the end of May.
Improvements confirmed
Candidates
The list of candidates is closed now. We are drafting its prioritization in our discussion with the Phabricator maintainers. If you want to suggest changes in this list (additions / removals) or changes in priorities, please post them in a new comment.
- T136071: Get Phabricator i18n ready for translatewiki.net
- T76732: Exact matches should always win when suggesting/auto-completing
- T33: Phabricator should let you add dependencies both ways (depending and blocking)
- T75851: Email notification for "edited the task description" does not contain the actual content changes (diff) nor a link
- T234: Projects dropdown should offer project descriptions
- T96464: Upon edit, a task description which mentions a Phab user (re)adds that Phab user to CC/Subscribers field (missing report upstream)
- T1035: Consolidate the many tech events calendars in Phabricator's calendar
- T634: pholio/new/ requires drag and drop
- T78824: Phabricator task description diffs inaccurate due to 80-character line wrapping
- T78078: Videos cannot be viewed without downloading
Lack consensus
If you want to discuss proposals in this list, please do it in their own tasks. Providing common usecases welcome.
- T624: Don't email users on cc changes by default (stress on "default"; unclear how many users really want this; changing the default setting is documented)
- T800: Equivalent to Bugzilla's "Users Watching" (unclear usecase why to follow users instead of projects)
- T883: Duplicate tasks are not listed in or near the description of the target task (unclear plan upstream; duplicated and related tasks seems to be addressed similarly, hence depends on T76101)
- T1378: Maniphest advanced search project selection is hard to understand ("In Any Project"; "Not In Projects"; "In Users' Projects" etc.)
- T76993: Quoting shouldn't readd me to a task I've unsubscribed from
- T77708: Content field ("Contains Words") should have more emphasis in Advanced search form (wontfixed upstream)
- T127641: Task creation form now forces self-subscription
Unclear status upstream
- T45: Phabricator should suggest possible duplicates when creating a new task (upstream isn't confident that they can build something which works well enough that they want to maintain)
- T96: Dependency tree view of tasks (a local patch exists)
- T109: Improve Phabricator's assistive technology support (creating specific upstream tasks needed; TheDJ provided a list)
- T110: Let users configure date format in account settings (upstream says it is fixed due to different task scope)
- T127: Find way to use Differential with plain git (i.e.: without requiring arc) (not actionable as upstream wants to investigate first)
- T225: Use translatewiki.net to localize Phabricator (up to upstream which infrastructure they'd like to use; funding might not help 'convincing')
- T1016: SVG attachments are not displayed (upstream has concerns about SVG and security risks)
- T1375: Generic advanced search doesn't link maniphest advanced search (asked in upstream what would be acceptable)
- T78236: Phabricator silently overwrites changes (no mid-air collision/conflict detection) (upstream is not confident of implementing a satisfactory solution before resolving other dependencies first. They note that T765: Enable notification server (real-time pop-up notifications) in Phabricator reduces the need for such feature.)
- T78257: Notification page describes events with ignored sub-events (related task is closed resolved upstream; Andre could not reproduce anymore)
- T78830: Phabricator discourages explaining non-trivial changes to a task (as actions are very modular) (upstream built this as part of EditEngine they didn't like it and backed away from it.)
- T85305: Phabricator email notifications should bundle events as the web interface does (upstream has no plans to do this)
- T85440: Footer is not visible in workboards (upstream warned that footer in workboards and Conpherence would be a lot more involved)
- T86464: Change default phabricator time format to something standard (don't use AM and PM) (lengthy discussion in related task upstream about user-defined formats; could be fixed locally via a translation hack, see T86464#1043362)
- T91289: Allow to disable "Notify" for token award in phabricator (upstream says that fixing this takes either a hardcoded solutions or a big amount of infrastructure work, and they don't feel like this is relevant enough to proceed with any)
- T91648: PHD ensuring umask goodness (closed resolved upstream; needs rechecking downstream)
- T98337: Light blue over light blue does not pass accessibility criteria (not a problem according to upstream; subtask of T109: Improve Phabricator's assistive technology support)
- T98570: In the Phabricator e-mail, say "[Commented]" in the subject instead of hiding the comment under the subscribing (upstream has an explanation for current behavior, related task is closed resolved)
- T127903: Projects should have an "Open Tasks" view by default (missing report upstream; likely to be a discussion on design decisions)
- T134398: Central task information is put in periphery by Maniphest (under discussion upstream)
Processing
You can help triaging these, moving under Candidates those which show a strong use case and consensus.
- T76825: Send a regular email with a saved search (like Bugzilla's "whining" for saved searches) (wontfixed upstream with explanation what's possible with regard to following activity in particular projects (which is not a 1:1 mapping of the original request)
- T84844: Notification "closed TN ..., a task blocking ..." is not marked read by visiting one task (missing report upstream, need current testing and assessment, looks trivial?)
- T86463: Some form content (Search; Create new task) not fully preserved after "Back" button (missing report upstream)
- T94675: Workboard columns renames are not logged in the UI (missing report upstream)
- T97751: Search projects by description (missing report upstream)
- T98334: Consolidate Conpherence settings into notification settings (missing report upstream, not an essential feature)
- T100400: Phabricator needs to handle bounces/errors from non-existent email addresses (there is no 1:1 mapping with upstream tasks, it needs review)
- T100943: Cryptic and redundant "Edges already exist; transaction has no effect" (missing report upstream, it is a trivial change)
- T115742: Feature request: filter task's bot CCs to the end of the ellipsis (missing report upstream, looks like a too narrow use case)
- T127908: Disabled workboards are still linked by tags (requires removing the Pin icon for the workboard under "Project Details") (too narrow use case, has alternative solution)
- T135728: Allow to download Pholio Mockups with Arcanist (missing report upstream)
- T135729: Provide thumbnails on the file list (missing report upstream)
- T135732: Quickly retrieve the file ID of embedded images (missing report upstream)
Ineligible
- T75854: Fix provided search results in Wikimedia Phabricator (marked fixed, but Phabricator search is still awful. It would be great to be able to reenable the Elasticsearch backend on our instance)
- T86849: Compress phabricator assets (favicon, CSS, JS etc.) (local downstream request to change our Varnish configuration)