Richard Eisenberg
I absolutely believe that we should use the best tools available and that committed GHC contributors should have to learn these tools as necessary. Though I've had my problems with Phab and `arc`, I'm confident that this tool was chosen after a deliberative process and am grateful that we have leaders in this area in our midst.
Agreed. Phab certainly has a learning curve and is not without its papercuts but on the whole seems to be an excellent tool.
All that said, I think that the suggestion just to accept GitHub pull requests will lead to confusion, if only for the namespace problem. If we start to accept pull requests, then we are de facto going to have to deal with both the GH issue tracker and Trac's (and Phab's), and that is a terrible place to be. Part of the automated response to pull request submissions could be a post on the GH pull request record pointing folks to the Phab review that was created in response. The pull request would then be closed.
This is where I was going with the beginning of a script I posted on Saturday. To me this seems like an excellent compromise: using the familiarity of Github to attract contributions and (hopefully) siphon them into Phabricator. The numbering conflicts may still be problematic but I suspect that in practice people will learn that the Github numbers are meaningless fairly quickly. Cheers, - Ben