[Bf-committers] Deprecation of Phabricator

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi everyone,

I regularly have discussions with people around me about our 
infrastructure. For as long Blender has been open source, almost 20 
years, I've always pushed for the highest level of independence from 
external service providers, specifically when it comes to our core 
activities.

That comes at a price though. I'm aware of the great set of tools that 
are being offered by Github nowadays. They make a good product. But I 
also see how such services take away essential freedoms from developers. 
If your activities becomes cloud based (compiling, testing, debugging, 
deploying) you allow a lot of control over your project by a third party.

This doesn't make Github bad by itself, please use it if you wish. It 
just means (for us) to keep the focus on our mission - which is to 
further the freedom for everyone to make and use open source 3D 
technology. That freedom applies to artists as well as developers. Or 
said differently;

- everyone should have the freedom to develop Blender and participate in 
blender.org projects.

 From the information I have, Gitlab seems to offer exactly what we need 
for Blender to remain independent, keep up with the latest trends for 
engineering and to offer this to an online community with a free/open 
source license.

I look forward to a further investigation of this topic. Meanwhile I can 
reach out to Gitlab to check on what support they're willing to offer to us.

Thanks,

-Ton-

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal - ton at blender.org - www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation, CEO Blender Institute / Studio
Buikslotermeerplein 161, 1025 ET Amsterdam, the Netherlands


On 31/05/2021 18:26, Sergey Sharybin via Bf-committers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just wanted to let everyone know that today Phacility announced that
> development of Phabricator is phasing out [1] [2].
>
> This does not affect the Blender project immediately, but we need to find a
> solution to the situation (be it a fork of Phabricator, or be it a
> migration to some other platform). There is no plan of action yet, it will
> be looked into in the coming time. We will keep you posted with updates on
> the topic.
>
> Would like to mention that Sebastian Parborg together with Dalai are
> working on a plan of action. At some point we'll share it with Blender
> developers, triagers, and the community. So don't be surprised :)
>
> [1]
> https://admin.phacility.com/phame/post/view/11/phacility_is_winding_down_operations/
> [2] https://secure.phabricator.com/
>
> Best regards,
> - Sergey -
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sergey Sharybin - sergey at blender.org - www.blender.org
> Principal Software Engineer, Blender
> Buikslotermeerplein 161, 1025 ET Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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