Open Stack

This proposal is all well and good, however (no offense intended) Monty's
got a history of putting out neat proposals and leaving "someone else" to
support it. Without identifying a dedicated person/resource that will
maintain phabricator, any discussion is moot.

Michael

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 8:16 AM Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:

> Monty Taylor wrote:
> > As a follow up to my previous email about thinking about ceasing to use
> > storyboard, I have done some work towards investigating using
> phabricator.
> > [...]
>
> For the record, I'll repost some of the analysis I did for mordred on this.
>
>
> Main blocker: Ability to track tasks across projects/branches
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> One of the main features we need from a task tracker in OpenStack is the
> ability to track the completion of tasks across projects and branches.
> That affects vulnerability management, bug backports, and generally
> cross-project work. The fact that Launchpad has a limitation there (on
> the number of tasks it supports before timeouting) is issue #2 with LP.
> The problem is stated once, then a number of tasks affecting different
> groups are created, and the issue is closed when the last task is
> completed.
>
> In Maniphest as it stands, that would translate into one of those:
>
> 1- Create a single task that affects multiple "projects"
> 2- Create a main task and multiple subtasks, one for each "project"
>
> The main issue with (1) is that you can't track partial completion (i.e.
> which groups have completed their task and which haven't), which is the
> main goal of using a common task tracker.
>
> The main issue with (2) is that it's difficult to see what groups are
> affected from the "main" task (since it only lists task names), and the
> main task is not autoclosed when the last subtask is closed (requiring
> manual intervention).
>
> In both cases, the UI allows multiple "projects" to apply to a given
> task, which is great for tagging, but not so great when you want to
> track tasks per affected repository and branches. Finally, there is no
> concept of branches -- we would have to create one project for every
> repo/branch combinations.
>
> Finally, "projects" have no relationship between them. So even if you
> associated a task to project "openstack/nova--master" you would have to
> also manually associate it to project "nova" (as in openstack/nova +
> openstack/python-novaclient) so that Nova team members could also find
> it there. There is basically no projectgroup concept, which is issue #3
> we have with Launchpad.
>
> In summary, I think Phabricator's "projects" concept is a (really) neat
> *tagging* system, with associated dashboard and all. It's just not meant
> to cover multiple "projects" in the OpenStack sense. Our projects have a
> few properties which make them difficult to emulate with Phabricator's
> "projects": there should be only one per task, they have an affected
> branch (master, juno...), and they are grouped into higher-level
> structures that can be searched and browsed as well.
>
> Phabricator seems to be sized for single separate projects, and it's
> "project" concept is just a way to organize work within that single
> project. It is pretty obvious when you see what happens if you click one
> of their "projects": you end up in a dashboard with one item per bug.
> Imagine clicking openstack/nova and landing on a dashboard with
> thousands of bugs: it's just not meant to be used for that. It is
> excellent for tracking a subset of tasks and organizing them, but not as
> a higher-level structure.
>
> So in order to make it work, we'd need a whole new concept added, let's
> call it "repository". Each repository may have multiple branches
> associated with it. When you create a task, you select a repository and
> a branch (and only one). That field is clearly shown in the task name
> (no need to drill down to the subtask to find which repo/branch is
> actually affected by the task). Clicking on that will bring you to a
> list of bugs affecting that repository. Repositories can be grouped
> arbitrarily into repogroups which let you search and navigate issues in
> a set of repositories, rather than force everyone to rebuild queries to
> find, say, "all infra issues".
>
> Then we could encode a rule so that when the last subtask of a repo-less
> task is closed, the parent task is auto-closed. Then that /could/ all
> work for task coordination for OpenStack, although it would be slightly
> less convenient than Launchpad or StoryBoard (which do not require you
> to drill down to update subtasks, and keep the discussion in one single
> place).
>
>
> Could do a lot better: CLI/API
> ------------------------------
>
> One of the main pain points with Launchpad is its partial API.
> Phabricator comes with the "arc" tool, but it is designed to drive the
> DVCS git-like featureset. There is no CLI for Maniphest, only a shortcut
> to make raw Conduit (API) calls. The Conduit API itself looks
> mostly undocumented and (2) "making Conduit more robust isn't currently
> a major project priority because there isn't much demand for it outside
> of internal scripts".
>
> We rely on a lot of scripting to interface with Launchpad, which is why
> a complete and clean API was such a significant part in StoryBoard
> design. It looks like the Maniphest story on APIs is actually worse than
> Launchpad.
>
>
> Could do better: Tracking feature development
> ---------------------------------------------
>
> A feature is a complex task for which you want specific rules to apply
> (like tasks may only affect master branch). It's good to visually
> separate them too, so that feature-frozen period clearly excludes them.
> Communicating the % of feature completion is also valuable information.
> Being able to order subtasks is a nice add too.
>
> Maniphest has no concept of task types, although it could be emulated
> with a "project" (we'd tag all features with a "feature" project), or we
> could use a custom field for that. It doesn't have a concept of feature
> completion status either. Ideally that would be derived from the number
> of completed subtasks, or set by the user on the top task. The absence
> of a story (or task group) might bite us here (since in Maniphest
> everything is a task, and completion only makes sense on a task group).
> Also you can't order subtasks in Maniphest at all.
>
> Not sure how to solve this one, and improvements around feature tracking
> are the #1 reason for StoryBoard to exist. But one could argue that it
> won't be worse than using Launchpad anyway.
>
>
> Could do better: ACLs for Vulnerability management
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> Vulnerability management is about the ability to file a report that is
> originally only seen by its reporter and a specific team. Then we
> gradually add people to the ACL as we pull them in to help with
> resolution, up to the point where the bug is open.
>
> While Maniphest has task ACL support, it is pretty crude. There seem to
> be no way to encourage people to file security reports privately (they
> have to find out and make use of the "Visible To" and "Editable By"
> dropboxes by themselves). Then there is no way short of defining a
> "Custom policy" for a user to say ("me and the VMT"). Then there is no
> way (short of expanding the custom policy) for the VMT to add
> individuals to the ACL.
>
> For this one to work, we'd need a way to encourage people to file
> vulnerabilities the right way (some sort of task creation template, or
> could be a separate website for vulnerability reports), then a way to
> make the bug visible/editable to "VMT and all subscribers". That way
> people we add to the CC end up being in the ACL without having to play
> with Custom Policies. A visual indicator of such bugs would also be nice
> (embargoed issues should not be discussed openly, and sometimes it's
> hard to remember the thing you are on is one of those restricted issues).
>
>
> We'd probably work around the limitation: Release reporting
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> One of the things we use Launchpad for is to produce release pages
> listing what features and bugfixes landed in a given release tag. There
> is no support for that (at all) in Maniphest. So we'd have to switch to
> git-log generated changelogs, but that may not be a crazy thing to do
> anyway. Release reporting is quite separate from task tracking,
> Launchpad just accidentally did both.
>
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> --
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>
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