Why Migrating from Phabricator to Phorge
List of differences between Phabricator and Phorge, shared to you from the Phorge community that forked Phabricator.
1. Project Directions
In Phorge, Evan Priestley is our spiritual beacon that illuminates our hearts but this person is not the Phorge project leader. So, in Phorge, directions are practically decided by your good proposals. So, you are practically welcome in joining the website of Phorge, ask questions, share ideas, propose patches (keeping backward compatibility - please) and probably they will be approved by somebody and included in Phorge! ✨
In Phabricator, Evan Priestley is the total leader maximum deciding directions. Note that this was probably the primary job of Evan, so we understand that Evan was not so happy to freely accept whatever community proposal, or invest time in onboarding new people in the website secure.phabricator.com.
2. Openness to Newcomers
In Phorge, anyone can:
- register in this website (click on the Login button above and register yourself)
- be able to ask Questions (in Ponder)
- then, if you are also marked as Trusted Contributors you can:
In Phabricator, it's not possible to join the official community forum to discuss changes, since it was switched off in 2022. Also, you cannot register in secure.phabricator.com since lot of years. So, for newcomers it is probably just not possible to contribute to Phabricator.
3. Change Proposals
In Phorge, it is probably much easier to propose a change. Believe me or not, but a completely external newcomer in 2023 was able in 20 days to propose 15 patches and most of them were accepted in Phorge in few days. Also, as a proof of that, Phorge is now proactively importing changes from Wikimedia (that Wikimedia has not proposed in Phabricator - see T15081).
In Phabricator, your code contributions are no longer accepted. Full stop (https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/contributing_code/). But also historically, in Phabricator was honestly difficult to propose a patch since, again, that was the work of Evan, and Evan was strongly encouraging to hold your own fork, versus pushing upstream changes. Just as an example of it: this is why - years ago - Wikimedia hackers decided to just keep their local fork instead of proposing their patches to Phabricator.
What else?
This page is just a stub. Feel free to contribute.
- Last Author
- valerio.bozzolan
- Last Edited
- Mar 30 2023, 11:16
Event Timeline
what's the point of this page? it's very easy to get a detailed difference between the code bases using git; Why create a manually-maintained list as well?
@avivey The problem is, I cannot annotate my git with comments and share them to folks in Wikimedia Foundation. Also, it's not simple to have a 1:1 match between our commits and theirs in secure.
Probably a way to automate that, is to add an additional fields in Diffusion commits like "upstream commit hash". But at the moment a manual wiki page solves some problems