epriestley was very much against this idea but wikimedia's users loved it.

Do we have epristley's reasoning as to why he was against this? Might help in deciding about including this patch in Phorge.

In T15082#2028, @golyalpha wrote:

epriestley was very much against this idea but wikimedia's users loved it.

Do we have epristley's reasoning as to why he was against this? Might help in deciding about including this patch in Phorge.

There is quite a lot of history on this one: https://secure.phabricator.com/T12144

Reordering milestones is convenient when you want to treat milestones as workflow steps rather than sequential numerical versions.

Projects and Subprojects already have the Workboard function, which lets you create custom columns for workflow steps. It is not clearly visible in Maniphest in which column a given task is, but you can see it in the Task view and moving a task from one column to another is possible in both the Task view and Workboard view. You can reorder these columns on the Workboard however you like. Heck, you can even have multiple projects assigned to a specific task and have them in independent places on the workboard. (Useful when you're treating projects and subprojects as teams of people)

I'm honestly with epristley on this one, because I don't see a reason as to why allow the reordering of milestones, unless you're absuing them like that.

That being said, which column a particular task is in should probably be more visible in Maniphest (possibly even filterable, so that one can just show all tasks in group Engineering, column Backlog)

In T15082#2028, @golyalpha wrote:

epriestley was very much against this idea but wikimedia's users loved it.

Do we have epristley's reasoning as to why he was against this? Might help in deciding about including this patch in Phorge.

There are two reasons to reorder milestones.

1. You accidentally created them in the wrong order (or need to insert a new one in the middle of the sequence). It's really annoying and hostile UX to be forced to rename them one by one. Especially when other types of columns already allow you to easily adjust the order.
2. For abusing milestones as workflow steps.

I think the reasoning is based on defining the concept of a milestone narrowly.

Phabricator's idea of a milestone is essentially a bucket to track tasks that are intended to be resolved during a release cycle. Each milestone is ordered relative to the other milestones. Any tasks remaining open at the end of the milestone get moved on to the next milestone and a task cannot exist within more than one milestone at a time.

Removing the sequential nature of milestones makes them much more flexible as workflow steps rather than time periods.

You could have something like:

One of the main advantages is that you can tag a task directly into a milestone from anywhere that phabricator lets you edit the projects which isn't as convenient for regular columns. Specifically, when you add a task to a milestone it gets removed from other milestones within the same project. This mutual-exclusion is the key benefit which you don't get with regular workboard columns.