| “ | As I understood it, the big gotchas for Phabricator adoption are that Phabricator doesn't manage repositories – it knows how to poll a Git repo, but it doesn't have per-repo access controls or even more than a shallow awareness of what a repository is ... [consequently], it would still need some work to efficiently deal with hundreds of repositories, long-lived remote branches, and some of the other fun characteristics of Wikimedia's repos. | ” |
—WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller addressing code review tool Phabricator | ||
Three weeks into a month-long evaluation of code review tool Gerrit, a serious alternative has finally gained traction in the review process: Facebook-developed but now independently operated Phabricator and its sister command-line tool Arcanist.
Phabricator has long been considered a possible alternative to Gerrit, first appearing in discussions way back in February this year, prompting the Wikimedia Foundation to invite its lead developer to visit the WMF office in San Francisco and "sell" Phabricator to several key members of staff, including Deputy Director Erik Möller. That meeting occurred on August 6, reviving Phabricator as a contender for the role of Gerrit replacement.
A test project was quickly established; nevertheless, it is unclear whether lead platform architect Brion Vibber, who is heading the review, considers it a workable enough solution at present given concerns about its design paradigm (see quote box). Vibber this week suggested that despite the original cutoff date (August 10) having passed without Phabricator's credentials having been proven, the code review tool should continue to be reviewed and investigated on an ongoing basis for the immediate future.
Continuing our series profiling participants in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme, whereby student developers are paid to contribute code to MediaWiki, the Signpost this week caught up with San Francisco–based student and amateur journalist Aaron Pramana, who took on the challenge of improving MediaWiki's watchlist feature.
| “ | For my project, I've been working with Wikimedia developer Alex Emsenhuber to give watchlists a revamp, adding features and improving the workflow of the watchlist for current and potential power-users. For many wiki editors, the watchlist is one of the most important features that the MediaWiki software has to offer. Many top ranked websites, from e-commerce sites like eBay to media sites like YouTube, have comparable features that help users track pages that interest them. It was my view that the watchlist should continue to evolve so that the MediaWiki software remains a potent tool for the collaborative exchange of knowledge. This project was designed to be an amalgamation of several smaller feature improvements which will make the watchlist more useful.
Thus far, the project has added watchlist grouping, permissions to make watchlists publicly viewable by other users, and a new raw watchlist page. Although these features are still at an early experimental phase, I would like to solidify the progress I've made up to this point and then solicit ideas from the greater Wikimedia community for a more detailed plan towards a possible Wikimedia deployment. The greatest challenge of the project has been assuming a scope of responsibility that is greater than a "typical" programming job. Every programming project I've participated in previously has emphasized specialization in one niche (e.g. one person does database work, another does UI design). However, GSoC teaches student developers to persevere independently and actively seek out help when needed, which are useful skills to have in the field. |
” |
Pramana added that after the GSoC project ends later this month, he'd love to solicit help from other interested developers, especially UI designers. Code for his project can be found on Gerrit; more human-readable updates also regularly find their way onto his blog.
.png)
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
Discuss this story
Finally, a WMF initiative that is actually useful! From mw:Admin tools development: "Sadly, the resources of the Wikimedia Foundation are limited, and we do not wish for this to interfere with our timely delivery of appropriate tools". Hmmm. I wonder why. MER-C 11:05, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]