mary-kate
commented
8 years ago Okay, I'll start.
WMF architecture (Phab & gerrit, gerrit to be replaced by Phab's Diffusion eventually)
+ Wider community of MediaWiki developers. GitHub, despite itself being a proprietary solution (ah the irony...) might be the number one choice for many FOSS developers and their projects these days, but that isn't so for most MediaWiki-related things.
+ It's FOSS. The Wikimedia Foundation strongly favors free and open source software (FOSS) solutions. In the past some WMF teams (a clear minority) used Trello and somesuch proprietary solutions, but AFAIK these have now been phased out in favor of the FOSS tools used by all other teams & community developers.
+ Uptime, predictability. I don't think I need to tell you just how big the Wikimedia Foundation is. But what I probably do need to tell you is this: I can't recall the last time WMF's developer sites (like Phabricator, etc.) got DDoS'd. GitHub on the other hand...well, it's not their fault, but GitHub seems to be a more lucrative target for those pesky DDoSers.
+ Privacy. WMF takes users' privacy very seriously. GitHub probably does, too, but the WMF is a non-profit and GitHub is a for-profit.
- Repository creation. Back when I started working on MediaWiki, MW used SVN as the version control system. Once you had an SVN account, you had write access to all of /trunk, which contained MW core code (/trunk/phase3), MW extensions (/trunk/extensions) as well as lots of other, more or less legacy things. As later on pointed out, this did mean that someone with SVN commit access could have deleted the core (and/or extensions) directory and caused lots of problems that way. Well, fear not, that non-issue has been "solved". One does not simply enter Mordor, I mean create a new repository on WMF's git. Instead one has to request it, and since only one person (QChris) handles repository requests, it might take a couple days for the repo to be created. This is annoying and AFAIK this issue isn't getting fixed anytime soon.
- gerrit. "Kill it with fire", said @zaori and a bunch of other MW developers, myself included. There's no sugar-coating this, gerrit is ugly and annoying and it's amazing that it "works". The only good thing about gerrit is that it will be going away in favor of Phabricator's Diffusion eventually, but I don't know of the precise timetable for that, if there even is such a thing.
-/+ Automated (unit) tests. On GitHub as well as on many other places, you, as a developer, are expected to take full responsibility of whatever you commit to the repo, to ensure that your code runs and there aren't any missing semicolons etc. On gerrit, many repositories have automated tests set up (see this patchset for an example). Jenkins will automatically give the patchset the verified flag if the code runs (sic; I kinda want to say "compiles" but PHP isn't a compiled language, thankfully) or if the code doesn't run, jenkins gives the patchset -2 which prevents humans from accidentally merging the code. Tests can be useful, but it's annoying that the configuration is stored (mostly) in dotfiles in the respective repository/-ies.
GitHub + We're used to it. Let's face it, having to change your toolkit from the things you've used to to something you might have never even tried out is annoying, to say the least. Trust me, I've been there. + SVN support. I might be the only one out of Brickimedia dev team who uses this, but damn, it is pretty cool. GitHub supports committing via TortoiseSVN or the command-line SVN binary as if you'd be committing to a SVN repository even though the underlying repo is a git one. How cool is that? - Not FOSS. Wanna run a local instance of GitHub? Sorry, not possible. GitHub's core product is not free and open source software, even though GitHub has open-sourced plenty of plugins and whatnot.
georgebarnick
neoncitylights
MtMNC
This discussion originally started from my comment at #449, which then transitioned into Brickipedia's wiki chat, but now has it's own ticket here! Below, I'll be covering the advantages and disadvantages in the next comment (from my point of view because the point of this discussion is to get an opinion from every developer and eventually reach a consensus of whether we should move or stay, based on if it's better for us in the long run) They'll probably mostly be UX points but definitely feel free to point the technical points to all of us as those are also just as important.
In the mean time while I try to write out my opinion feel free to comment on this :+1:
Note: Github merges both tickets and source code together, while wikimedia's hosting is seperated into two sites:
I provided some abbreviations also for discussion so it's shorter to reference