by carwyn on 5/29/21, 9:35 PM with 138 comments
by nine_k on 5/29/21, 10:18 PM
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.
by ferdowsi on 5/29/21, 10:27 PM
The task management system isn't bad either, considering how weak Github's is and how bloated JIRA is.
by bogota on 5/29/21, 11:00 PM
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.
by 20after4 on 5/30/21, 6:17 AM
by saurik on 5/29/21, 10:10 PM
by franciscop on 5/30/21, 2:36 AM
Github is also well known and has issues, PRs and a CI all integrated into one, while with Phabricator each of these are either a self-host Jenkins (again, friction) or in a totally different/confusing location.
It's sad to see a tech company that many liked go, but hopefully this means the higher ups will reconsider Phab usage in my company :)
by kuba-orlik on 5/30/21, 5:43 AM
* keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the changes
* ability to add a comment to multiple lines of code
* ability to suggest changes inline
* comments are saved as I type them, so an accidental tab close saves my work
* comments are submitted in batches when I choose to, not one-by-one after saving each one. Its's sooo useful, because it often happens that I ask a question about some piece of code and upon further reading I find the answer, so I can delete the question before submitting all the comments and the author won't be bothered by it
If anyone knows of a feview tool with similiar set of features, please please let me know :)
When it comes to task management in Phab, I like how the tasks can be arranged in a dependency tree. We have our "todo" view set up so it only shows tasks without dependencies and sorted by prioroty, so the work on the project self-organizes
by abbe98 on 5/29/21, 10:18 PM
Wikimedia still uses it[1].
by kaendfinger on 5/30/21, 5:40 AM
Phabricator will hold a great place in my heart as software written by a developer for developers that is well thought out, dog-fooded to the max, and fun.
My hope is that it can be well stewarded by a company into continuity. I wish I had the time to do so.
In short, thank you Evan and all those in the community for many years of wonderful software development.
by twalla on 5/30/21, 4:44 AM
by carwyn on 5/29/21, 9:36 PM
Shame, the code review was good and one of the few that supported task dependencies :(
by 01100011 on 5/29/21, 10:08 PM
by wilsonthewhale on 5/30/21, 2:25 AM
It's basically the traditional ultra-scalable mailing-list + patches workflow, but with very nice tooling and UI on top.
I'm going to miss it when I leave FB some day.
by thrower123 on 5/29/21, 11:27 PM
> Pre-Commit Code Review
> Review others' code with Differential, because they can't be trusted.
> Shows code so you can look at it.
> Leave helpful comments and anecdotes.
> Challenge the intern's test plan.
> Gently place bad code back in the author's queue.
by geuis on 5/29/21, 10:37 PM
by Aeolun on 5/29/21, 10:33 PM
by aseipp on 5/30/21, 1:29 AM
Evan, if you're reading this and I'm ever in San Francisco soon, I'll have to buy you lunch!
by andrewmcwatters on 5/29/21, 10:20 PM
Quite nice to see it saw 11 years, though.
by ZuLuuuuuu on 5/29/21, 10:16 PM
by justinzollars on 5/29/21, 11:51 PM
by quadrifoliate on 5/30/21, 12:34 AM
It's used at my current workplace (self-hosted) for both. We aren't big enough to effectively take over maintenance – but I hope someone does. It would be a shame for it to be replaced by 10 other tools that reimplement the same features poorly.
by shaneos on 5/30/21, 11:28 AM
by user5994461 on 5/30/21, 10:34 AM
Existing instances will continue running "indefinitely". How can a company be shutdown and promise to run forever at the same time?
How does this affect phabricator on premise and phabricator online?
The 1st of June is tomorrow, today is a week end. This is a zero day notice for users, including paying users. Hope you weren't planning to start a new project on Monday. Ouch.
by ofrzeta on 5/30/21, 6:00 AM
by codeapprove on 5/29/21, 10:13 PM
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).
by IshKebab on 5/30/21, 3:35 PM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 5/29/21, 10:10 PM
by thiht on 5/30/21, 7:58 PM
I like the simpler approach offered by Bitbucket/GitHub/Gitlab. Reviewing is easy and painless.
by bubble0h7 on 5/30/21, 10:10 PM
Thank you to everyone who has worked on it over the years!
by jcrben on 5/30/21, 12:33 AM
by tychota on 5/30/21, 4:47 PM
I'm sad, because:
- I started using Phabricator in 2012 and tried some contribution back then, when I was still learning. I learn PHP working on contribution.
- The product is really awesome and back then, the difference with GH and others was even more striking. Draft PRs years before GH, proper issue management with work board years before GH, a lot of automation (Herald) and an yet unmatched ability to customize the interface, and build extensions to the program. In peculiar, behind able to define custom lint and unit test and have them integrated to the UI is awesome. I've seen others good ideas come before its time, in peculiar with integrated CI/CD, being able to see links between everything (issues, diffs, wikis, ect)
- The codebase is awesome. I mean, they build a fully modular system from nothing, just raw PHP. In my sense, they build one of the best PHP framework along the product. The architecture is nice, and they had really great ideas (overheating queries https://secure.phabricator.com/T13133, EditEngine/ApplicationEditor: https://secure.phabricator.com/T9132). Bob, Chad, and Evan are awesome devs. They helped me improve and shaped me as a developers. They also created a fondation of craftmanship with stances like: "Don't create to much config, it is a sign of badly designed product" and so on
- I learned a lot about infra deploying phabricator.
- They was a lot of humor back then: https://secure.phabricator.com/T10000, https://secure.phabricator.com/T10054#151066, https://secure.phabricator.com/T6389
For all this, thanks Evan, and others. It was a nice adventure. I will really miss this...
... but for me that was expected, the contributions shrinked, the core team went from 3 to 1. External contribution was also more and more difficult and while I understand the reason (reviewing and maintaining is more expensive than doing all yourself), it build a model that only depend on the willingness of one man. Also lack of proper integration with Gitlab/Github (Nuance https://secure.phabricator.com/T12739), sticking to an old, pre React area JS framework called Javelin did make the end inevitable. I did see the contribution decrease overtime(see https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/graphs/contributors). In the last years, Phabricator was just a ghost to me, sadly...
I hopes that Evan is well, and the end of adventure is not to bitter.
I think too much depends on Phabricator for it too end like that, and I'm looking forward to @20after4 or others to fork. Maybe it will have a second breath.
Anyway, so long and thanks for the fish !
by evilelectron on 5/29/21, 10:25 PM
by fooker on 5/30/21, 3:24 AM
All the big companies have their own private fork resulting in zero contributions to the main project.
by smitty1e on 5/29/21, 10:05 PM