Phabricator/versus Gitblit

Diffusion vs. Gitblit

As of June 2016 we switched our repository browser to Diffusion (phab:T752) from gitblit (was at https://git.wikimedia.org) .

Advantages

• Privacy: doesn't load external resources from googleapis.com.
• Nice minor features of the project summary
  • README preview
  • "Locate file" quicksearch by filename
• Allows grepping file content and filename from Browse > Show search (grepping not enabled on our gitblit, but was widely used when we used gitweb)
• Easier to configure
• "Path was deleted" feature when looking for a deleted file.

Disadvantages

• No repository metrics
  • May be addressed by Korma - T118753
• Will not be able to show big diffs.
• No ZIP/tarball download.
• No RSS/Atom feeds (example usage).
• URLs of repositories use callsigns instead of the full name of the repo (e.g. diffusion/MW/ vs. /summary/mediawiki%2Fcore.git).

Neutral

• Discoverability: like gitblit, diffusion was set up with a restrictive robots.txt. Some things may not be blacklisted yet.