Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

[Posted December 18, 2014 by jake]

On his blog, André Klapper describes Wikimedia's move from Bugzilla to Phabricator, which is described as an "open source software engineering platform". After ten years and 70,000+ bugs, there was a lot of data to migrate, which went well overall, though there were a few surprises along the way. "We had to work around an unresolved upstream XML-RPC API bug in Bugzilla by applying a custom hack when exporting comments in a first step and removing the hack when exporting attachments (with binary data) in a second step. Though we did, it took us a while to realize that Bugzilla attachments imported into Phabricator were scrambled as the hack got still applied for unknown reasons (some caching?). Rebooting the Bugzilla server fixed the problem but we had to start from scratch with importing attachments." (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 18, 2014 23:58 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (10 responses)

A PHP based product makes sense for Wikimedia but I'm surprised they would move to a product with a CLA, hmm.

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 19, 2014 1:36 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Not sure what the harm is in an Apache-licensed project having a CLA? The Apache project and PSF both require contributors to sign substantially identical forms; AFAICT it just says "I promise that the code I'm contributing is something I have the right to contribute and I really do mean to contribute it".

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 19, 2014 5:48 UTC (Fri) by parent5446 (guest, #94607) [Link] (2 responses)

As of now, only bugs have been moved over to Phabricator, not patch submission or code review.

Also, not only can Gerrit also require a CLA, but AFAIK Phabricator does not necessarily require developers to submit a CLA.

"You Must Sign the CLA"

Posted Dec 19, 2014 20:07 UTC (Fri) by Nemo_bis (guest, #88187) [Link] (1 responses)

It does, according to their instructions. https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/c...

"You Must Sign the CLA"

Posted Dec 20, 2014 5:56 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I think this was more that "Phabricator can be setup to require a CLA, but is not required", not that Phabricator itself requires a CLA.

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 20, 2014 0:40 UTC (Sat) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link] (4 responses)

Wikimedia also uses Facebook's HHVM - the whole site runs on it now - and devs contribute fixes to HHVM under a CLA. (The CLA grants Facebook permissive-licence-like rights to your code, but HHVM is under the PHP licence, which is permissive anyway.)

It's all free software, that's orthogonal to whether there's a CLA. (As undesirable as CLAs can be.)

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 25, 2014 13:16 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (3 responses)

That's interesting. Did anyone from Wikimedia post publicly about their experiences with it?

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 26, 2014 14:46 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link] (1 responses)

There wasn't a blog post (I did ask them to!) but there were a couple of wikitech-l posts which were quite informative:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-Jul...
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-Dec...

(Current status: API traffic is now on HHVM too. Though unit tests are still run against Zend PHP as well.)

This is actually way bigger and more interesting news than it seems to have been taken as. Wikimedia is now the second major HHVM site. I so so so want HHVM packaged for Debian/Ubuntu ...

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Jan 8, 2015 3:23 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

HHVM is already packaged for Debian and waiting for legal/quality review:

https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/hhvm_3.2.0+dfsg1-2.html

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 30, 2014 1:13 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]

The blog post is just up:

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing...

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 20, 2014 1:41 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I was under the impression that Phabricator was under a Facebook CLA, not one similar to the Apache CLA, sorry for the noise, the move from Facebook to Phacility was unknown to me.

Personally I don't understand why a CLA is needed for Apache, surely the Apache 2 license plus something like the Linux DCA is enough?

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 22, 2014 7:51 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (6 responses)

I too am moving my team away from Bugzilla (well, more like replacing an *ancient* version of it). We are test-driving Redmine as our choice of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink solution.

AFAICS, the main difference between Redmine and Phabricator is the business rules thing. I am missing something?

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 25, 2014 1:17 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link]

Seen https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket ? (...posted in the interests of not promulgating more PHP on the 'net)

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Dec 27, 2014 15:21 UTC (Sat) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link] (4 responses)

Why not replace the ancient version with an up-to-date version? Bugzilla has come a long way since the 2.x days...

Gerv

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Jan 5, 2015 9:26 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

Because migrating all your data (with possible partial dataloss) and replacing working solution with a new kewl one, is what all kidz do to have fun?

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Jan 6, 2015 13:11 UTC (Tue) by mp (subscriber, #5615) [Link]

And migrating all the data from an old Bugzilla to Redmine is going to be easier than to a new Bugzilla? Why?

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Jan 7, 2015 14:48 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

two words: SVN support. Our managers insist on keeping using it, they love setting permissions on the code.

But I will have a look at it, thanks.

Klapper: Good bye Bugzilla, welcome Phabricator.

Posted Jan 7, 2015 15:14 UTC (Wed) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

Are you suggesting that new Bugzillas don't integrate with SVN as well as old ones do? That would be news to me. What addon are you using which hasn't been updated?

Gerv