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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Phabricator had seemed to be the only good product in this space when I had looked; what are people even using instead? (I guess they just put up with GitHub :/.)

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Gerrit is solid: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

The UI is atrocious, unfortunately.

Check again - it got a serious makeover recently. It's still far from intutive, but so much better than it used to be.

It's a power user tool that has a slight learning curve.

Gerrit is a code review tool first, with code browsing not being a core focus.

GitHub and others are frequently code browsing tools first, with code review coming second. "Code hosting has look like GitHub" is unfortunately a common myopia.

Phabricator (from the little I used it) seems closer to Gerrit than other code hosting.

Ack! Recently moved from Phabricator to Gerrit and deleting Arcanist was a plus.

Does it still desperately want you to squash all your patches, or does it do a good job of handling an ordered stack of patches these days?

It does an excellent job handling stacks! You may be mistaking it for Phabricator, which defaults to squashing.

I suspect that JoshTriplett is complaining about the `amend` workflow required to update a single gerrit patch with revisions.

If you're used to the GitHub pull request style, you'd be more likely to make a small commit and add it to the request. In gerrit that approach results in a separate patch for review, which isn't what such a person would want.

(Personally, I've come to appreciate gerrit's model for strongly encouraging building patches that are encapsulated single-reviewable-changes, in a way that lends itself to never having a commit that'd break the build if you landed on it e.g. during a git bisect.... But it's also something that surprises people who've not used gerrit before, in my experience.)

That's part of it. But also, if you start with a 4-patch series, and you want to publish a v2 that's changed to a 3-patch series, Gerrit doesn't seem to handle that very well. In general, I'd prefer if patches are kept together in one review, rather than a separate review for each.

Gerrit handles this perfectly - you can just add the third commit to your stack (and even amend the earlier ones) and it works as expected, adding it to the relation chain.

Gerrit is good, if opinionated in ways that we have to put work into onboarding for. That said, it only covers a small subset of what Phabricator does -- it's missing the entire issue tracker part, most importantly.

If you're looking for an issue tracker to use with Gerrit, that's open source and developed by Google, you could try Monorail: https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/refs/heads/m...

It'd be nice if it had a tightly integrated issue tracker and CI.

Yeah: the only feature I thought gerrit provided--active blocking code review--is actually the one feature of Phabricator that I had no interest in... I loved all of the other features.

Most of the stuff that Phabricator was used at our company is now done in (self-hosted) Gitlab. I think the only thing that's still actively there is credential management, and I can only imagine there are better solutions for that than Phabricator.

Is the issue tracker in GitLab a lot better than GitHub? I always was under the impression that they had simply been trying to copy GitHub, but I find most of GitHub's features toy-level unusable :(.

GitLab employee here.

It started that way for sure, but we’ve evolved with boards, milestones, epics, swim lanes, burn down charts and a lot more.

We have a whole group in our engineering and product org focused on making it even better: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/

There is also https://www.reviewboard.org/

I used reviewable.io at my last company, and now use phabricator. I actually still prefer reviewable, so give that a look.

gitlab is good and can still be self hosted

Yes but unfortunately Gitlab’s choice of features that go into the non free vs the open source version seem increasingly designed to deter use of the open source version.

Even on installing the self hosted Gitlab, the open source version is hidden, with the free yet closed source version being pushed.

We evaluated https://gitea.com/ and really liked it.

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