Phabricator debrief (was: Serious alternatives to Gerrit)

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 10:26 PM, Erik Moeller <erik <at> wikimedia.org> wrote:
> As one quick update, we're also in touch with Evan Priestley, who's no
> longer at Facebook and now running Phabricator as a dedicated open
> source project and potential business. If all goes well, Evan's going
> to come visit WMF sometime soon, which will be an opportunity to
> seriously explore whether Phabricator could be a viable long term
> alternative (it's probably not a near term one). Will post more
> details if this meeting materializes.

We had this conversation with Evan today. The following people
participated: David Schoonover, Brion Vibber, Rob Lanphier, Chad
Horohoe, Terry Chay, Ryan Lane, Ori Livneh, Roan Kattouw, and myself.
Evan gave us a walkthrough of Phabricator's current capabilities,
comparing it against the evaluation criteria on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Gerrit_evaluation .

Some thoughts below; if you participated, please feel free to jump in
with your thoughts/impressions from the conversation, and/or to
contradict anything I'm saying. 

As I understood it, the big gotchas for Phabricator adoption are that
Phabricator doesn't manage repositories - it knows how to poll a Git
repo, but it doesn't have per-repo access controls or even more than a
shallow awareness of what a repository is; it literally shells out to
git to perform its operations, e.g. poll for changes - and would still
need some work to efficiently deal with hundreds of repositories,
long-lived remote branches, and some of the other fun characteristics
of Wikimedia's repos. Full repo management is on the roadmap, without
an exact date, and Evan is very open to making tweaks and changes as
needed, especially if it serves a potential flagship user like