After consulting with @MaskRay on what is possible, I propose this timeline:
- Oct 1: Prevent the creation of new differentials (code reviews)
- Nov 15: Prevent the upload of new patches to existing differentials
- Dec 15: Stop importing new commits from github
- Remain in this state for at least 6 months. Comments are allowed.
The goal here is to greatly ramp down the maintenance burden of Phabricator by 2024, and also avoid doing anything significant over the holidays. As shown in this recent thread, a large chunk of the load on Phabricator comes from importing commits from git. This includes closing active code reviews. The hope is that we can maintain Phabricator in a comment-only mode for a long time at very low cost.
This will not address the use case of maintaining long term code review continuity. Specifically, for those long-running, year+ language feature implementation reviews, they will have to be reuploaded as pull requests. However, it will extend the time available for folks to comment on old issues and link forward to pull requests that continue the patch or reopen an old review.
Does that seem workable for reviewers who are draining their review queues?