Phabricator migration update - Wikitech-l

18 Jul 2014

Hi,

this is a quick status update on the planned migration of our
development planning tools to Phabricator. See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator for general info.

Several things have been worked on and achieved in the meantime:
      * WMF SUL Authentication has been implemented for Phabricator. 
      * A separate server legalpad.wikimedia.org was deployed (a tool to
        manage trusted users - workflow to be further defined with
        Legal. 
      * A data backup system for Phabricator in place. 
      * Code to restrict access to tasks in a certain project is in
        place (same as Bugzilla's "Security" project)
      * The dedicated Phabricator server was upgraded to Ubuntu Trusty. 
      * Packaging for Debian using pkg-php-tools/dh_php5

The identified tasks are listed on the planning board at
http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/board/31/

Bugzilla:
When it comes to the planning of how to convert data in Bugzilla tickets
to Phabricator, we are mostly done.
The elements that a Bugzilla report includes are listed in
http://fab.wmflabs.org/T423 with links to subtasks.

Obviously, Phabricator has a different UI and different workflow
concepts than Bugzilla. 
While it's not the goal to have complete feature parity in every
possible way, I'm pretty confident that we are close enough.

As people are likely more interested in what Bugzilla functionality will
be different, I'll try to summarize what I'm aware of:
      * Bugzilla's products, components and keywords will be turned into
        projects / tags in Phabricator.
      * Bugzilla votes will be turned into tokens.
      * Bugzilla's "Severity" field itself should get dropped - for
        example, if there is a real need to be able to search for
        critical severity (which translates to "crash"), it can become a
        "crash" project in Phabricator (think of "keywords" in terms
of
        Bugzilla here).
      * For those ~50 users who have used Bugzilla's private "Tags"
        feature so far (introduced in February), this feature will be
        dropped, but you will get warned before. Similar, some
        Whiteboard data will likely also get dropped (or moved into the
        first comment if really considered relevant).

Apart from that I am not aware of any other data we might drop or
"lose", or any other important functionality that would not be available
in Phabricator.

If you are passionate about a specific topic of task management /
development workflows && if you think after reading existing comments in
the discussion of the related task that an important aspect has not been
considered yet, please feel free to provide your input.

To follow the progress of our Phabricator migration and to help, please
see the planning board at http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/board/31/
Regular status updates are published at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Migration#Status

As usual, big thanks to Chase and Mukunda for their work, and to many
others for providing input, feedback and help.

Cheers,
andre
-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/