[LLVMdev] Phabricator (Was: Automatically adding llvm-commits as CC)

[Justin Bogner]

Moving this to llvmdev - it needs a bit of a wider audience.

There are several issues with phabricator, and in the current state of
things there's a huge amount of confusion on how to even report
problems, let alone try to resolve them.

Recently I started a thread about empty emails, was directed to the
phabricator project's bug tracker, and told there that LLVM has
customized phabricator so there's nothing they (phab) can do. Soon
after, the message I'm replying to below was sent to llvm-admin, and it
was pointed out that they don't maintain phab, so there's nothing *they*
can do:

Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> writes:
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 1:31 PM Tanya Lattner <tonic at nondot.org> wrote:
>> On Apr 30, 2015, at 4:25 PM, Matthias Braun <matze at braunis.de> wrote:
>>> This happens to me as well from time to time. I wonder if there is a
>>> way to have phabricator add llvm-commits to CC as soon as
>>> "repository llvm" or "project llvm" is selected. Or maybe revisions
>>> with an empty subscribers field could be rejected.
>>
>> llvm-admin doesn't administrate the phabricator. You need to contact:
>> Manuel Klimek or Chandler Carruth.
>
> This has been discussed before. If you look at the prior discussions on
> llvmdev about phabricator you should find lots of references to it.
>
> I don't want to repeat the entire discussion but the essence is "sure, it
> could be done, but someone must write the code to do it". The code is posted
> where you can get at it, we can even put it in an LLVM repository if that
> helps, but so far none have stepped up to write the code to make this happen.
> I donated hardware to get this whole thing started for a year, and Manuel did
> the much more time consuming work to get it up to the point it is currently
> at, but I don't think he has a lot more time to devote to it.

I appreciate the effort that you (Chandler) and Manuel have put into
this, but I find this answer a bit lacking in important details.

Where is the code posted? Where is the documentation about that? The
docs at http://llvm.org/docs/Phabricator.html don't tell me anything
more than "Please let us know whether you like it and what could be
improved!".

Most importantly, where can I file bugs about LLVM's phabricator
instance?

> Fundamentally, we need folks in the community to contribute if they have
> significant problems with the tools.

Personally, as a reviewer, I find phabricator reviews strictly worse
than sending a patch to the llvm-commits list. Off the top of my head,
with phab:

- The patch doesn't always show up on the mailing list,
- Replies to review comments and the patch that accompanies them come in
  different emails,
- Several emails show up in your inbox with nothing but a link, and no
  indication why they were sent,
- Comments and responses to comments sometimes show up twice - once from
  the person who says them and another time from phab,
- Patches are often (but not always) duplicated - both inline *and*
  attached. This is bizarre, useless, and confuses tools like git-am.

With an email it's trivial to read the diff or to apply the patch to an
LLVM checkout to look at in more detail, including building it or
looking at the result in a text editor.

I realize that quite a few people find the web interface helpful, so
I've refrained from asking people to post patches directly rather than
using phab so far, but that *would* solve my problems with the tool. We
at least need some clear information on how to file bugs and where to
look if we want to try to fix the problems ourselves.