Phabricator had seemed to be the only good product in this space when I had looked; what are people even using instead? (I guess they just put up with GitHub :/.)
Gerrit is good, if opinionated in ways that we have to put work into onboarding for. That said, it only covers a small subset of what Phabricator does -- it's missing the entire issue tracker part, most importantly.
Yeah: the only feature I thought gerrit provided--active blocking code review--is actually the one feature of Phabricator that I had no interest in... I loved all of the other features.
I suspect that JoshTriplett is complaining about the `amend` workflow required to update a single gerrit patch with revisions.
If you're used to the GitHub pull request style, you'd be more likely to make a small commit and add it to the request. In gerrit that approach results in a separate patch for review, which isn't what such a person would want.
(Personally, I've come to appreciate gerrit's model for strongly encouraging building patches that are encapsulated single-reviewable-changes, in a way that lends itself to never having a commit that'd break the build if you landed on it e.g. during a git bisect.... But it's also something that surprises people who've not used gerrit before, in my experience.)
That's part of it. But also, if you start with a 4-patch series, and you want to publish a v2 that's changed to a 3-patch series, Gerrit doesn't seem to handle that very well. In general, I'd prefer if patches are kept together in one review, rather than a separate review for each.
Gerrit handles this perfectly - you can just add the third commit to your stack (and even amend the earlier ones) and it works as expected, adding it to the relation chain.
Gerrit is a code review tool first, with code browsing not being a core focus.
GitHub and others are frequently code browsing tools first, with code review coming second. "Code hosting has look like GitHub" is unfortunately a common myopia.
Phabricator (from the little I used it) seems closer to Gerrit than other code hosting.
Most of the stuff that Phabricator was used at our company is now done in (self-hosted) Gitlab. I think the only thing that's still actively there is credential management, and I can only imagine there are better solutions for that than Phabricator.
Is the issue tracker in GitLab a lot better than GitHub? I always was under the impression that they had simply been trying to copy GitHub, but I find most of GitHub's features toy-level unusable :(.
Yes but unfortunately Gitlab’s choice of features that go into the non free vs the open source version seem increasingly designed to deter use of the open source version.
Even on installing the self hosted Gitlab, the open source version is hidden, with the free yet closed source version being pushed.