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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

To clarify: this applies not just to phabricator-dot-com, but Phabricator the software: https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/9ceb66453501...

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.

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FB's phabricator went its own way long ago. I imagine this has exactly zero impact on their day to day.

Put it this way: the last time I saw it, they still had the "clowncopterize" button. Try finding that anywhere else.

I heard this was still in the non-fb version if you uncheck "super serious business mode" in the settings somewhere

That sounds fun! What did it do?

It was the reviewers "Approve" button for a submitted patch. The options are/were (approximately) "Reject", or "Clowncopterize"

Do you mean Facebook is running a fork of Phabricator, or what?

Facebook’s diff tool looked similar maybe 5 years ago but there’s been constant improvements to it in that time. There was a dedicated team maintaining and improving it. Today it bears only a passing resemblance to Phabricator.

GP’s claim that Facebook uses Phabricator is an overstatement.

What I remember of Phabricator when I used it years ago was the very confusing naming of things, that didn't improve the user experience. It did have a nice command line tool to help you in your workflow.

I think Phabricator's heyday was during a time when everyone was trying to formalize their workflow, another project of that time was git flow.

> Phabricator should be reasonably easy to self-host anyway.

It's a bit of a mixed bag compared to other self-hostable applications. There are a lot of moving parts, and the initial setup requires 60 different unique databases. It has a handful of background daemon-like processes that occasionally get wedged.

But, overall, there are some really interesting pieces of architecture in it, it's a really big project, and it does a lot of things pretty well.

I'm sad but not surprised to see this news.

5-10ish years ago I stood up both gitlab and phabricator. The latter was much easier. I really, really liked phabricator, though much of it's advantages went away when using DVCS; for SVN, it's command line tools were just a joy to use by comparison.

> This is unexpected.

They've been down to only one developer (Evan himself) for a while. Still sad :(

https://secure.phabricator.com/differential/query/all/

And upstream made it pretty clear that they weren't interested in contributors or building a community :( https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/cont...

> To contribute to the Phabricator upstream, you must first pass a series of ancient trials and be invited to register an account in the ancestral homeland of Phabricator, here on secure.phabricator.com. The nature and location of these trials is a closely guarded secret.

epriestly has a weird sense of humor. The "trials" were probably sending him a friendly email. (I worked at FB at the same time as him)

Maybe, but I could also see it deterring would-be contributors.

I think it was to encourage companies to sign up for support accounts. You can't even comment on issues without one.

I think that's just being honest. Most open source projects make you jump through hoops, they just usually pretend they dont exist.

That’s humor. And based on it the location of the URL to create an account is likely very obvious.

I think Blender and KDE uses Phabricator as well.

KDE has been in the process switching away (to Gitlab) for a while.

Yeah, we already switch to Gitlab for code review. But the task management utility in Phabricator are far superior to Gitlab, so it's a bit complicated to switch to Gitlab for now.

There has been three big reasons why we are trying to switch from phab to Gitlab:

* Upstream wasn't very interested in external contributions or hearing our suggestions

* arcanist was a real pita to use for new contributors. Switching to gitlab really increased the number of occasional contributors.

* Setting up CI with Phabricator to run on Diff (the Phabricator equivalent to merge request) was not easy.

GitLab team member here.

What are biggest task management features from Phabricator you don’t find in GitLab?

Issue dependencies with a graph showing all up- and downstream blocking/blocked issues.

Add Mozilla, Mercurial and LLVM to the list.

And Wikimedia.

And FreeBSD.

LLVM switching off will be a big deal. They might even move to Github after this as they moved their repositories to github, too.

Lubuntu uses it. We'll have to get this sorted out at some point.

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