Open Stack

In the first two episodes, our hero concentrated on modeling complex
tasks (the ones that involve multiple projects and branches) using
Phabricator, with varying degrees of success.

Today I did some more investigation on that front and summarized my
findings on the wiki page:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Phabricator

TL;DR: is: I think we could make it work using a hefty dose of custom
development and patch-carrying.

Today I also looked into the CLI and API. The CLI is extremely limited
as far as Maniphest goes -- you can query tasks assigned to you and
that's about it. You can also use it as a proxy to send API calls.

The API is pretty weak at this point, and that has me worried. Partial
API support is one of the reasons we want to move off Launchpad, and
Phabricator seems even worse in that respect.

For example, while you can create a task, subscribe people, set status
etc. using the API, you can't define the relationship between the tasks.
That means we won't be able to bypass some of the repo/branch tracking
oddness by writing helper tools that will do the boring work of setting
up multiple interrelated tasks for you.

It's a known issue, apparently not trivial to fix:
https://secure.phabricator.com/T5873

I wouldn't say this is a blocker (and I expect the Phabricator folks to
come round and fix it one day), but something we need to take into
account in our decision.

This concludes the time I allocated to investigate how far Phabricator
is from covering OpenStack needs. Hope this was helpful.

Cheers,

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)