In T283980#7123905, @MGChecker wrote:

In T283980#7123724, @hashar wrote:

I propose we keep this task open for a week or so to let people land tokens of appreciation to Phabricator / Phacility @epriestley (creator of Phabricator and founder of Phacility) and then close it. Surely we would have a project / working group to discuss about the future.

I'd appreciate if this does not happen behind closed doors but at some place where volunteers can read along and give input.

Definitely. My 2c: perhaps a community maintained fork would be better? Presumably migration would be easier and it would ease the pressure on existing power users for migration.

Much love to @epriestley for starting this project, helping us move to it, and incorporating our feedback and contributions. In my opinion, moving to Phab was the best decision we've made in the almost 9 years I've been here. Thank you, @epriestley, for your part in that.

I also want to appreciate @epriestley for all that he's done over the years.

I have really, really enjoyed using Phabricator here. I assume that we will eventually migrate to another task management solution, but I'm a bit nervous about it since I think it will be hard to find something as good. That's a testament to Phabricator's quality and strong vision. Thanks for the years we shared 🤝

In T283980#7123515, @ashley wrote:

Phabricator is a great piece of software and while it's unfortunate that Phalicity, Inc. is closing, it does not mean the end of Phabricator, nor should it. That's the true marvel of free and open source software.

+1

In T283980#7123849, @mmodell wrote:

There are already several companies and open source projects maintaining their own Phabricator forks. I've been maintaining Wikimedia's fork for 6 years and I've been an upstream contributor even before I worked for Wikimedia. I wouldn't be surprised if other organizations or individuals are interested in collaborating on a shared, community-maintained fork. Even without development of a new upstream, Wikimedia's fork is currently maintained and doesn't need an upstream to continue in a stable state for quite some time.

Can you share a bit about how much Wikimedia's install is forked from upstream? Are most other installs also forks or vanilla Phabricator?

I'm currently running (as of this week) wiki media's phab fork on an install without issues

Can you share a bit about how much Wikimedia's install is forked from upstream?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Code (in theory)

All of the commits unique to the wmf/stable branch: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/phabricator/compare/?head=wmf%2Fstable&against=stable

It's fairly minimal, quite a few small changes and a couple of fairly large ones. Some of the changes became obsolete by upstream eventually fixing things or otherwise changing the code such that the local patch didn't make sense anymore. Overall I think the difference in the code base is very small.

In T283980#7123515, @ashley wrote:

Sounds like it's time to create one if one doesn't yet exist, then.

As a MediaWiki user, I would not be happy if WMF's developers move to phab project, because phab is a project as large as MediaWiki (or larger than) and the resources are limited always. In my sight, there are not enough things which are shareable betweet mediawiki and phab. If it becomes inevitable, the features not used in this phab instance should be removed in the fork, for example, code review.

I wonder if there is another organization (Linux Foundation?) that Wikimedia could partner with in order to continue maintaiance and development of Phabricator?

I don't think Wikimedia have enough resource to maintain Phabricator independently.

Considering how Phabricator was maintained so far, I think that it might be possible for a small team to maintain it.

I mean for what purpose are we collecting donations if we do not do anything with it…

In T283980#7130885, @dbarratt wrote:

I wonder if there is another organization (Linux Foundation?) that Wikimedia could partner with in order to continue maintaiance and development of Phabricator?

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name. I hope that Wikimedia will be a part of that effort, at least by sponsoring some of my time towards it, however, I intend to contribute in a personal capacity as much as I can.

In T283980#7130822, @Lens0021 wrote:

As a MediaWiki user, I would not be happy if WMF's developers move to phab project, because phab is a project as large as MediaWiki (or larger than) and the resources are limited always. In my sight, there are not enough things which are shareable betweet mediawiki and phab. If it becomes inevitable, the features not used in this phab instance should be removed in the fork, for example, code review.

Don't worry, we aren't diverting any developers from MediaWiki work to instead work on Phabricator. That hasn't happened and I don't expect to see that happen.

In T283980#7131487, @Bugreporter wrote:

I don't think Wikimedia have enough resource to maintain Phabricator independently.

We've been maintaining a fork for a long time now. We don't have resources to maintain the upstream project as it was but that isn't what's being proposed.

In T283980#7135209, @mmodell wrote:

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name. I hope that Wikimedia will be a part of that effort, at least by sponsoring some of my time towards it, however, I intend to contribute in a personal capacity as much as I can.

Please name it Phork. Please name it Phork.

In T283980#7136114, @stjn wrote:

In T283980#7135209, @mmodell wrote:

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name. I hope that Wikimedia will be a part of that effort, at least by sponsoring some of my time towards it, however, I intend to contribute in a personal capacity as much as I can.

Please name it Phork. Please name it Phork.

+1 to the name suggestion, but is there also any public documentation about this discussion and fork? I'd be interested in following along (and I'm sure others on this task would be too)

In T283980#7136131, @DannyS712 wrote:

In T283980#7136114, @stjn wrote:

In T283980#7135209, @mmodell wrote:

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name. I hope that Wikimedia will be a part of that effort, at least by sponsoring some of my time towards it, however, I intend to contribute in a personal capacity as much as I can.

Please name it Phork. Please name it Phork.

+1 to the name suggestion, but is there also any public documentation about this discussion and fork? I'd be interested in following along (and I'm sure others on this task would be too)

https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/t/ongoing-communications-fork-etc/4836/2

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YxQ_JGdhWYPSdoaI_m1TLzwbGLZdtOD7ux2SVL263Ow/edit# had data from # phabricator on IRC too.

In T283980#7136114, @stjn wrote:

In T283980#7135209, @mmodell wrote:

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name. I hope that Wikimedia will be a part of that effort, at least by sponsoring some of my time towards it, however, I intend to contribute in a personal capacity as much as I can.

Please name it Phork. Please name it Phork.

(The Phork Phoundation. [Terrible for SEO but too attractive to pass up.] Even phork.org sounds cool.)

In T283980#7136171, @Izno wrote:

In T283980#7136114, @stjn wrote:

In T283980#7135209, @mmodell wrote:

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name. I hope that Wikimedia will be a part of that effort, at least by sponsoring some of my time towards it, however, I intend to contribute in a personal capacity as much as I can.

Please name it Phork. Please name it Phork.

(The Phork Phoundation. [Terrible for SEO but too attractive to pass up.] Even phork.org sounds cool.)

Yup, Phork sounds cool

In T283980#7135209, @mmodell wrote:

Several of Phabricator's users and long time contributors are coming together to fork phabricator, with @epriestley's blessing and under a new name.

Nice to do it in a coordinated fashion, but why a new name? Can't the trademark and other assets be transferred to a suitable entity, for instance the Apache Foundation or SPI Inc. or whatever, so that it can be continued with less disruption?

In T283980#7136515, @Nemo_bis wrote:

Nice to do it in a coordinated fashion, but why a new name? Can't the trademark and other assets be transferred to a suitable entity, for instance the Apache Foundation or SPI Inc. or whatever, so that it can be continued with less disruption?

Apparently Evan isn't ready to abandon Phabricator entirely, he's just stopping paid support and focusing his attention on other endeavors. I've been assured that the upstream will continue to exist with irregular updates at his discretion. Trusted committers (such as myself) will be able to merge minor patches, e.g. security patches & small/non-disruptive fixes.

Some of the discussions that have been ongoing are summarized in this summary/chatlog:

This happened in a really short time after the whole IRC debacle, why can't there be a Phabricator hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation? A big issue is also all the links to Phabricator tasks in Wikimedia archives as a lot of discussions happened on this website rather than any other.

I honestly thought that this website was already a Wikimedia website as it has "Wikimedia" in its URL. Can all past Phabricator tasks be migrated from this website onto another? The problem with being dependent on third parties is that once they fall, you fall as well. The Phabricator is VERY important to Wikimedia websites and almost all technical error documentation exists here (likely even more than on the MediaWiki website), migrating to "a native server" (thus a Wikimedia website) also means that people can receive notifications via their Wikimedia SUL accounts and we could be sure that 50 (fifty) or a hundred (100) years from now any Wikimedia links to the Phabricator will be unbroken. It's time for third party dependence to stop.

In T283980#7140531, @DonTrung wrote:

This happened in a really short time after the whole IRC debacle, why can't there be a Phabricator hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation? A big issue is also all the links to Phabricator tasks in Wikimedia archives as a lot of discussions happened on this website rather than any other.

I honestly thought that this website was already a Wikimedia website as it has "Wikimedia" in its URL. Can all past Phabricator tasks be migrated from this website onto another? The problem with being dependent on third parties is that once they fall, you fall as well. The Phabricator is VERY important to Wikimedia websites and almost all technical error documentation exists here (likely even more than on the MediaWiki website), migrating to "a native server" (thus a Wikimedia website) also means that people can receive notifications via their Wikimedia SUL accounts and we could be sure that 50 (fifty) or a hundred (100) years from now any Wikimedia links to the Phabricator will be unbroken. It's time for third party dependence to stop.

It is hosted on Wikimedia servers.

In T283980#7140531, @DonTrung wrote:

This happened in a really short time after the whole IRC debacle, why can't there be a Phabricator hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation?

We do host our own deployment of the upstream Phabricator software. The issue is not that our hosting is disappearing, it is that the founder and primary maintainer of an upstream software project has announced that they will no longer be maintaining the software.

Can all past Phabricator tasks be migrated from this website onto another?

We will certainly try when we get to that point, yes. You may or may not remember, but all of our bug tracking used to be done using Bugzilla. We migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator in 2014 (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/versus_Bugzilla) and in the process moved all the bug reports and comments here.

It's time for third party dependence to stop.

A "not invented here is bad" attitude is fairly unhelpful in solving technical problems. Where does one stop in a journey down the stack in the name of self-control?