Phabricator[0] is a more mature alternative if anyone is interested in an open source and free substitute for GitHub. I think the only thing GitLab might have over Phabricator is a familiar GitHub like UI. Phabricator was an internal Facebook project that was open sourced. It's actually far more than just a substitute for GitHub. It has a much better system for managing issues, and better code review tools as well as other powerful features. My favorite feature is the herald system[1].
Phabricator is a very good tool! But calling it a substitute for GitHub seems a bit off. GitHub (and GitLab) revolve around repositories. As the name implies they are focused on git and git workflows. As a user you are using `git` most of the time when interacting with the systems.
Phabricator on the other can supports `git`, but that's just one of the supported storage systems for phabricator. As a user you are using `arc`, phabricators command line tool.
I've seen many people having issues with using `arc`, having used, say github, prior to that. This got better recently when the `arc land` workflow was improved.
It's a fine substitute for GitHub. Both are source code and project management tools. Just because they have different user interfaces doesn't meant that they don't solve the same problem.
Phabricator is much more flexible and that comes with a small cost in complexity, but the result is a system which provides a superior workflow, especially in enterprise environments:
I just can't get into Phabricator. Babel switched to it for issues. I find it hard finding anything. I kind of wish they would mirror the issues on to Github.
When I see Phabricator I just don't see anything. I just see a blob of text dumped to the screen. Maybe it's because I'm so use to Github.
No it's not just you. I find it hard to explain but GitHub does have the right amount of white/empty space to make consumption of information easier. I've always hated the simplicity of GitHub's layout, but after studying their commits and branches pages for my product, I've grown to appreciate their simplicity.
It's the little things that GitHub does, that I've found makes the difference. Take GitLab's branches page here:
By limiting the number of branches shown and by creating strong visual breaks/barriers, they make it way easier for the user to focus. Seeing a wall of branches is okay ... when that's what you want, but as a default, by organizing it the way that GitHub does, they make their branches page significantly easier to consume.
I also find the buttons too be a little too big in GitLab and they don't have enough definition to them, to help you focus on them. Creating merge requests and comparing branches is the focal point of the branches page, and they should make it easier for your eyes to lock onto them.
Like I said, it's the little things that I can't explain that I've come to respect and I don't think it's just because we are familar with GitHub.
Agreed. I just signed up to try out GitLab and went to browse GitLab's own source code to see what they were using. First thing: Rails, clearly. Second thing: Holy crap, I have to scroll this much on my laptop to browse their project? The amount of whitespace is bonkers. A bit of googling tells me that they made this change a few months ago with GitLab 8.0, but the bug report about the whitespace seems to have been ignored.
I really like what GitLab is doing, but I also really like a powerful web-based repository browser (search tool included). Hopefully they just went a bit wild with the UI and they'll rein it in. (I also checked Preferences and they have a switch for fixed vs. fluid layout, so maybe they've been responsive to UI-change revolt in the past?)
I don't disagree with GitLab's network view being more useful. People also shouldn't assume GitHub isn't fallible with their decisions. The fact that it took, I don't know how many years for them to implement side by side diffs is living proof of this.
GitLab just needs to work on the little things and they can really be disruptive to GitHub's business.
Another little change that I think would go a long way, is changing the folder icon. I don't know why, but the round corners in the folder icon really irks me. There is also something off about the font that they are using. I think it's just too thick, but I can't really put my finger on it.
I was commenting more on how there is a hidden element that GitHub has, that would explain why the person that I responded to would feel he/she was looking at a wall of text. I used GitLab and GitHub's branches page as an example, since I studied both quite a bit and it was easy to highlight how sparseness has it's advantages and how it can shape ones perception.
the other issue with phabricator is workflow. The way I think (and most other people) is on a repo basis - all bugs, reviews, wiki is contained within a repo level.
However phabricator maintains different "applications" - bugs, repos,etc. so to look at the bugs for a repo, I have to go to the top level, click on Maniphest (the bug tracking "application" ) and go to the project and then click on a bug.
very unintuitive.
If you don't like a piece of flavor because it's a joke that you don't get or don't find particularly funny, but it doesn't impact your ability to understand or use the software, we're less likely to remove it. We find all our jokes very very funny and cherish each of them dearly.
(If you're committed to removing flavor on grounds of taste, we might be willing to accept changes which replace our objectively very very funny jokes with even better ones.)
Question: has anybody used hosted Phabricator for hosting their git repos (as well as bugs, etc.) ? How would you compare against github and bitbucket. Really seriously considering it because we can move to our own install very easily. But not sure what people think about it. I'm particularly interested in triggers and hooks (e.g. sending an email after commit, posting to bitbucket,etc.).
I've never actually heard of this, thanks for the links. We use gitlab at work but I took quick browse of this site and it seems pretty cool. Does phabricator have a CI server out of the box that's easy to use? One of the major draws to gitlab recently (at least for me), is a CI server available to the projects for free.
> Phabricator includes applications for: .... counting down to HL3;
> If you prefer a more straightforward tone, you can disable most of the flavor by turning on the phabricator.serious-business setting in the Config application.
I'm also a phan, but phabricator is more complex than GitLab and doesn't have (to my knowledge) a free, hosted version like gitlab.com. It also isn't quite as appropriate for open source projects, in my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience with it. I really do love differential though, and its UI is very cohesive.
Phabricator has been in use as a production tool for years and it shows. It is much more sophisticated in terms of workflow and real-world use than alternatives.
Note that not all of those use Phabricator as a bug tracker (KDE, lighttpd, LLVM, Haskell, I imagine a lot of bugs for Wikimedia are reported through project chat pages on the wikis themselves).
[0] http://phabricator.org/
[1] https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/hera...