Andreas Abel
On 05.10.2014 07:03, Ben Gamari wrote:
and yet aren't willing to take the five (twenty?) minutes to familiarize themselves with Phabricator and the arc toolchain.
Are you serious about this? I think your time estimate is a grand illusion.
Fair enough; this may well be an underestimate. To form the number I tried thinking back to my own experience starting off with Phabricator (back in August, IIRC) which went roughly as follows, 1. I asked `thoughtpolice` about this new-fangled Phabricator thing 2. He pointed me to the GHC wiki [1] 3. I ignored nearly everything on the page but `The CLI` section, installing PHP (this is where I'm thankful to be running Linux where package installation is quite straightforward) 4. I ran `arc diff`, 5.a. I reflected on the mild shock of seeing that `arc` had squashed my carefully crafted patch set into a single commit. This still bothers me to this day. 5.b. I moved on with life and had a coffee All-in-all this perhaps took half an hour from start to coffee. Admittedly, I had very little understanding of what was going on underneath the shiny veneer (and more or less still don't), but I did successfully submit a patch. This being said, I can see that there are several places where this can go awry. I hate to think of what this might look like on Windows. Moreover, I have absolutely confidence that git would preserve my work, regardless of what unholy things this new tool did to my repo. Without this confidence I would have tread far more carefully which inevitably would have cost time.
I attended Joachim Breitner's talk about Phabricator at the GHC developer meeting, that already (nearly?) used up the twenty minutes you allow. Yet I still have to
* try it the first time, * make sure I get everything right, * learn to *trust* the tool * that is does the right thing, * does not do anything bad to my files * etc. pp.
The brightest might be up to get on track in a couple of hours, but the majority is quite hesitant towards new tools...
Prior to my experience I had read in a variety of venues about all of the wonderful things that Phabricator would do for us. I understand that casual contributors without this background may find it harder to even motivate beginning the process of picking it up, regardless of how easy this may be.
Human condition.
Point taken. I agree that it can't hurt to expose a more familiar interface to the world. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Phabricator