Phabricator/Migration

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Status[edit | edit source]

2015-02-monthly:

Phabricator was upgraded and received several fixes such as improved matching in the "Projects" dropdown proposals. Also, project links by default show the workboard (if set up) instead of the project summary, received a project bar on the left, and some URLs changed. The Sprint extension shows avatars on cards, is invoked by setting a checkbox in the project settings instead of using an "§" in the name, the Burndown chart does not depend on Maniphest task status anymore, and supports setting "Can Edit Task Status" and "Can Assign Tasks" policies (currently not enabled). The full list of changes is available and corresponding documentation was updated. Regarding migration of teams to Phabricator, the Collaboration team migrated from Trello (thanks to improvements on the Trello migration script) and Language Engineering team migrated from Mingle. Phabricator's search was reverted from ElasticSearch to the MySQL backend, fixing numerous issues. Furthermore, the separate legalpad.wikimedia.org was removed (superseded by phabricator.wikimedia.org), work continued on turning Bugzilla into a static version. The "Needs Volunteer" priority was renamed to "Lowest", Gerrit repository ownership permission handling moved fom the wiki to Phabricator, the documentation about the "Security" dropdown got improved, Gadget-BugStatusUpdate.js got adapted to Phabricator, email task creation instructions were clarified, the "Export to Excel" button renamed, and guidelines for tracking tasks versus projects were written.


Rationale[edit | edit source]

The Wikimedia technical community is currently using plenty of different tools for tracking bugs / product management / project management / todo lists. Some are open source and others are proprietary, some are self-hosted and others are hosted by third parties, and all in all the multitude of tools and channels makes it difficult for both staff and volunteers to keep track of what's happening. They also all have their own limitations.

A review of our project management tools was started, including an assessment of our needs and requirements, and a discussion of available options. A request for comment was set up to gauge interest in simplifying our development toolchain and consolidating our tools (gitblit, Gerrit, Jenkins, Bugzilla, RT, Trello, and Mingle) into Phabricator. The result of the RFC was in favor of Phabricator. The consensus was also that there were blockers that had to be addressed before any migration was considered, and that any migration had to be carefully planned and as carefully executed.

We're now in the process of planning for that migration, resolving blockers, etc.

Documentation[edit | edit source]

Communications[edit | edit source]