1554274 - Phabricator should pick up authorship information from `git format-patch`

Status: NEW

(Conduit :: Phabricator, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Here is a case where I tried to use Lando to land a patch written by a contributor (Greg) but failed and had to fall back to mozilla-inbound.

The patch in question is D27983. I believe it was originally submitted by pasting the output of git diff into the Phabricator web UI.

Lando gave me this error about it:

"Diff does not have proper author information in Phabricator. See the Lando FAQ for help with this error."

The linked FAQ item seemed to suggest setting up moz-phab, but it appears that's complicated if you're using git? Quoting from Greg's comment:

I didn't want to set up the whole git-cinnabar + custom fork of arc thing. I've been working with the github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev mirror — can I even convert to the hg cinnabar remote without re-cloning?

Why is all this complexity required just for author information of all things? That's just ridiculous >_<

I suggested running git format-patch and pasting the generated diff file into the web UI rather than the output of git diff, since the diff generated by git format-patch includes an Author: ... header line with the relevant information. However, Phabricator did not seem to pick up on that and the Lando error about not having proper author information persisted.

As mentioned, I ended up just landing the patch manually onto mozilla-inbound.

It would be nice to reduce the friction here. In particular, since git format-patch generates a file containing the relevant information, Phabricator should be able to pick that up and use it even if it's pasted into the web UI.

Comment 1

[:glob ✱]

(In reply to Botond Ballo [:botond] from comment #0)

Here is a case where I tried to use Lando to land a patch written by a contributor (Greg) but failed and had to fall back to mozilla-inbound.

The patch in question is D27983. I believe it was originally submitted by pasting the output of git diff into the Phabricator web UI.

Be aware the following message is displayed when using the web UI to create a revision:

Please use moz-phab, arc, or another Phabricator client to submit patches if you want them to be landable using Lando.

The linked FAQ item seemed to suggest setting up moz-phab, but it appears that's complicated if you're using git? Quoting from Greg's comment:

I didn't want to set up the whole git-cinnabar + custom fork of arc thing. I've been working with the github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev mirror — can I even convert to the hg cinnabar remote without re-cloning?

We're actively working on reducing the barrier to entry there - you no longer need to manage a custom fork of arc, and moz-phab won't rely on arc at all in the near future.

Unfortunately git-cinnabar is required as your local VCS has to match the repo on the server.