# Phabricator is no longer actively maintained



## a6h (Oct 24, 2021)

Effective June 1, 2021: Phabricator is no longer actively maintained

I've heard somewhere and I can't remember when/where, the Project is going to find something else [any citation?].
Using mailing-lists is the safest approach. It has been working since Net/2. It works for similar projects, e.g. OpenBSD.

I wonder what will happen, when Discord hits the EOL. Right now, it's bad enough. Search engines are not able to index its content.
Which means new users, new problems and new solutions, all behind a wall and unreachable from the outside world. Good luck!


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## zirias@ (Oct 24, 2021)

Reviewing patches/commits in a mailinglist is certainly possible (and GIT kind of "supports" it with `format-patch`), but cumbersome and error-prone. You won't have the one place showing the whole thing including all comments in their respective context. I see no need to go back to the stoneage here. I mean, you could also argument that programming in assembler has been working fine for ages…

There are many tools offering such functionality, and it's typically accessible for anyone with a web browser. Github would be one example, although I wouldn't recommend FreeBSD to depend on external services. Maybe www/gitea could be a solution, although I'm unsure how this would affect the existing workflows (I think it would require a branch with commits to do reviews on). But I'm pretty sure FreeBSD will find _something_ that matches and can be hosted by the project.


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## mark_j (Oct 24, 2021)

It was mentioned in FreeBSD office hours on Sept. 13. Warner Losh made mention of it, but didn't offer up any alternatives, and in fact asked for alternatives to be offered.
It's not an urgent issue as it's fairly stable but the "owners" of it have decided they no longer want to work with it.

There are alternatives to phabricator of course, some better, some worse. There are also forks of phabricator like phorge. 

And yes, mailing lists work, though the collaboration is a little harder to follow sometimes.

I personally don't mind phabricator.


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## zirias@ (Oct 24, 2021)

mark_j said:


> And yes, mailing lists work, though the collaboration is a little harder to follow sometimes.


It very much depends on the complexity of the change under review and the amount of comments and changes addressing these comments. For simple cases, doing it on the ML is just as good as using a dedicated tool. For a multi-commit change with lots of discussion and following changes to the commits discussed, following this on the ML is close to impossible.


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## mer (Oct 24, 2021)

It's a bit cumbersome but git supports code review and commenting.
The problem is like a text editor, any choice of a code review mechanism will have half the users annoyed at the choice


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## PMc (Oct 26, 2021)

Zirias said:


> Reviewing patches/commits in a mailinglist is certainly possible (and GIT kind of "supports" it with `format-patch`), but cumbersome and error-prone.


Might still be better than not doing it at all.


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## reddy (Oct 26, 2021)

Instead of switching it would be better and easier to simply fork phabricator and keep it in maintenance mode (update dependencies for security vulnerabilities etc...). When a tool has become business critical, why move away from it just because someone else no longer is interested in it. The next tool that will be picked may also stop being maintained at some point.

I used to switch in this kind of situations, but you end up living like a nomad. Nowadays If I really enjoy the way a tool works and I invested time in integrating it to my workflow, I just fork it. So that I remain in control of my destiny and I go deeper with my tools instead of always chasing new ones.


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## astyle (Oct 26, 2021)

Yeah, this is cause for concern - I'm grateful that Google can index these forums. And yeah, I can see why it would have difficulties with Github or Phabricator - it takes some interest and education to find what you're looking for. Phabricator was incredibly useful for me when looking for info on KDE Wayland. But in the process of searching for information, I had to learn a few new things, and change my search strategies, not just search terms, before I found what was relevant. I don't think it's that easy to teach an indexer program search strategies like that.


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## msplsh (Oct 26, 2021)

reddy said:


> Instead of switching it would be better and easier to simply fork phabricator








						Home
					






					we.phorge.it
				




_edit_ P.S. This is the "official" fork based on collaboration with the original author, who seems to have a new baby and is done dealing with computers for a while.


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## astyle (Oct 26, 2021)

Oh, nice. So, even though Phabricator's original project members are no longer interested in continuing the project, it looks like someone is stepping up to keep a nice idea going.


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