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2 | 2 | @group intro
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3 | 3 |
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4 | 4 | Insight into the direction and progress of Phabricator. This document was last
|
5 |
| -updated **June 29, 2011**. |
| 5 | +updated **July 22, 2011**. |
6 | 6 |
|
7 | 7 | = Status =
|
8 | 8 |
|
9 | 9 | Phabricator is in an early release stage, but quite usable. The project is under
|
10 |
| -active development, with around 200 commits from a dozen contributors in the |
11 |
| -last 30 days. Morale is high. A few people are tweeting about it. Someone wrote |
12 |
| -a Wikipedia page. There are a handful of questions on Quora. As far as we know, |
13 |
| -the product has a perfect safety record and has not caused anyone violent |
14 |
| -physical harm. |
| 10 | +active development. |
15 | 11 |
|
16 | 12 | = Current Development =
|
17 | 13 |
|
18 |
| -Phabricator was released about two months ago. Since then, the focus has been |
19 |
| -on two major areas: |
| 14 | +The current focus on Phabricator is primarily feature buildout, particularly in |
| 15 | +these applications: |
20 | 16 |
|
21 |
| - - **Setup/Install Process**: There was barely any install/setup documentation |
22 |
| - when we released. |
23 |
| - - **Pilot Installs**: Facebook was the only install when we released. We |
24 |
| - wanted to get some early adopters to do installs and give us feedback. |
25 |
| - |
26 |
| -The setup/install process is much better now (there's still room for work, of |
27 |
| -course) and we've gotten a bunch of great feedback from pilot installs (and |
28 |
| -implemented a lot of it). |
29 |
| - |
30 |
| -We've also been focusing a lot on things that are mostly feature buildout: |
31 |
| - |
32 |
| - - **Maniphest**: I wrote Maniphest in about 20 hours in January to track bugs |
33 |
| - in Phabricator itself, but it seems to be getting a lot of traction. We're |
34 |
| - doing a lot of feature buildout for it to make it more full-fledged, more |
35 |
| - scalable, better integrated, and more useful. |
36 |
| - - **Maturing New Applications**: Generally, there are a lot of apps |
37 |
| - which landed recently in Phabricator's history (Maniphest, Projects, Search, |
38 |
| - and Paste are all less than 6 months old; Herald and Diffusion are about |
39 |
| - a year old; Differential is about 4 years old) which are missing obvious |
40 |
| - features. We're fixing this stuff. |
41 |
| - - **Roles and Permissions**: At Facebook, everyone basically had access to |
42 |
| - everything but this doesn't work everywhere, especially for open source |
43 |
| - projects. We're working on making this more granular and auditable. |
44 |
| - - **Version 1.0**: At some point we probably need to bite the bullet, figure |
45 |
| - out release management, and cut a release. We should probably build some |
46 |
| - kind of update notifier before we do this. We can probably put this off for |
47 |
| - a while longer by just declaring trunk a "kind of okay now release" since |
48 |
| - the balance of feedback for this model has been positive (we've been able to |
49 |
| - respond quick to a lot of bug reports and get fixes out in a few hours), |
50 |
| - it's just off-putting to have the documentation caveating the project's |
51 |
| - readiness so heavily. |
52 |
| - - **Performance and Quality**: These are permanent priorities for the project, |
53 |
| - and we're doing a lot of work to continue improving both. |
| 17 | + - **Maniphest**: A lot of early adopters are getting into the suite because |
| 18 | + of this tool, and we're continuing to improve it. |
| 19 | + - **Phriction**: We just landed a wiki application, which basically works but |
| 20 | + needs a bunch of improvements. |
| 21 | + - **Feed**: A rough cut of feed landed recently but needs a ton of work. |
| 22 | + - **Projects**: Projects are getting a bit more useful, but we want to |
| 23 | + continue adding features. |
54 | 24 |
|
55 | 25 | = Future Development =
|
56 | 26 |
|
57 |
| -Most of the future work involves feature buildout. These are projects we're |
| 27 | +Most of the future work also involves feature buildout. These are projects we're |
58 | 28 | thinking about in a very early stage, and may not happen or may look completely
|
59 | 29 | different when we implement them:
|
60 | 30 |
|
61 |
| - - **Activity Streams / News Feed**: It can be difficult to get a sense of |
62 |
| - project activity right now. Some sort of news feed is the obvious approach, |
63 |
| - but a lot of the models for this aren't great (Google Code, GitHub, |
64 |
| - Facebook's internal news feed) and we can probably build a more useful |
65 |
| - product if we spend some time on it. This dataset has a pretty good mapping |
66 |
| - to "importance" (a review is more important than a comment) which isn't as |
67 |
| - strong in social data. Stressing that might get us somewhere useful. |
68 |
| - - **Projects**: This is a feature which existed with a very basic |
69 |
| - implementation at Facebook, called "tags". It had a lot of product problems |
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| - that we're experimenting with addressing by making projects more heavyweight |
71 |
| - and structured. This feature is really bare-bones right now but seems to |
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| - be getting some traction in pilot installs and there are a lot of obvious |
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| - ways to build it out, integrate it, and make it more useful. |
74 |
| - - **Wiki**: We're probably going to build something like a Wiki since it's |
75 |
| - the biggest hole in the "complete package" that Phabricator presents. We |
76 |
| - have a lot of the infrastructure we need to do this quickly and some product |
77 |
| - ideas which could fix a lot of the problems we had with Facebook's wiki. |
78 |
| - Biggest blocker here is coming up with a totally awesome name for it. |
| 31 | + - **Hosted/Managed Repositories**: We're starting to develop some features to |
| 32 | + let Phabricator host or manage repositories, since this simplifies and |
| 33 | + unblocks some stuff we'd like to eventually build. |
79 | 34 | - **Drydock**: Build infrastructure to let Phabricator manage working copies
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80 | 35 | in a scalable way. This is a general piece of infrastructure which enables
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81 | 36 | us to build a lot of features, like: sandcastle (your changes are
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@@ -104,3 +59,4 @@ different when we implement them:
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104 | 59 | the many other products in this space? For now, improving the software is
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105 | 60 | probably the most important thing we can do to achieve any of these goals,
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106 | 61 | but we don't currently have a clear long-term vision.
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| 62 | + |
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