1599815 - Pushing VCT with "--no-arc" fails due to missing blank policy

Status: NEW

(Conduit :: moz-phab, defect, P3)

Description

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

To reproduce

1. hg clone version-control-tools && cd version-control-tools
2. Update your .arcconfig to point to `https://phabricator-dev.allizom.org/"
3. Make a change and commit (e.g.: "testing: no-arc push fail (Bug 1349188))
4. moz-phab --no-arc

[Access Denied: Restricted Differential Revision] (<bad-ref>) You do not have the required capability ("<bad-ref>") to do whatever you are trying to do. // This object has an unknown or invalid policy setting (""). The owner of a revision can always view and edit it.

Comment 1

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

This might be strictly related to the Phabricator dev instance, but not for the production instance? Not sure, but I don't want to spam the production instance with test patches

Comment 2

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

Looking further, this is related to the version-control-tools repository for sure.
I ran the same reproduce steps with the https://hg.mozilla.org/automation/phabricator-qa-dev/ repository, and moz-phab --no-arc works.

One theory mentioned by smacleod is that moz-phab --no-arc fails for version-control-tools because the VCT repository isn't set up for the phabricator-dev instance? If that's the case, this might just mean that we need to either:

• Display a nicer error when the repository being patched doesn't exist on the phabricator instance
• Allow the patch to be created on phabricator (like how arc would do it)

Comment 3

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

This only fails if working from my version-control-tools directory after changing the target phabricator instance 🤔
(as in, doing a fresh clone and immediately changing the .arcconfig doesn't cause the issue. I'm guessing you need at least one push to the real Phabricator instance, then need to change the .arcconfig to see this issue?)