[RFC] A huge problem with Github diff

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 14-11-2012 21:36, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 11/14/12, Alex Rønne Petersen <alex at lycus.org> wrote:
>> Or we could switch to Phabricator for our entire review process which
>> has an absolutely awesome side-by-side diff and is generally a fantastic
>> tool for distributed-style software projects.
>>
>> See my email to dmd-internals:
>> http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/dmd-internals/2012-October/004900.html
>
> I don't see what's awesome about it, for one thing the code display
> pages don't seem to be static HTML (or whatever you call it), because
> every time I enter into codeview I have to wait a few seconds for all
> the code to render. For big changes it's annoying to having to wait so
> long. And if I hit the back button and forward again, it starts to
> re-render again and I have to wait again. Clicking the show context
> can take over 5 seconds to display, and then Firefox almost freezes
> because the CPU usage keeps spiking to 90%. Pretty lame if you ask me.

Cannot reproduce in both Firefox and Chrome; code view also loads 
instantaneously for me.

>
> It's also inconsistent, my font settings I've set in the control panel
> aren't applied everywhere.

You need to manually configure your monospaced font in Phabricator in 
your display preferences. Any other font that isn't being applied 
correctly is a bug. I don't know why they do it this way for monospaced 
font, but I don't find it to be a show stopper.

>
> And what is Arcanist, it seems it's betaware like msys, except much
> less tested on Windows? Quote: "NOTE: Windows support is relatively
> new and incomplete, file bugs when you run into issues." And you even
> need to install PHP to make it work.

 From what I've heard, other Phabricator/Arcanist users have no trouble 
on Windows these days. The support was very alpha quality a while back, 
but it should be fine now.

(I don't actually know. I don't use Windows.)

>
> And then there are things like making the code block button
> automatically insert some sort of PHP/Ruby code. Does it even support
> D syntax in comments?

It's just some code to demonstrate how the syntax works. Hit delete once 
and it's gone (or just don't use that button at all; why would you?).

Yes, it does support D (it uses Pygments).

>
> The last thing we need now is to make the the barrier to entry for
> contributions skyrocket.
>

That seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, it requires you to 
install a little extra software, but the end result is a much more 
manageable, human-friendly, and scalable review/audit system than GitHub.

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org