Organize, update, and improve some documentation.

src/docs/contributing/contrib_intro.diviner

@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ development install for open tasks in the "Bootcamp" project which are owned by
 "Up For Grabs". These are small-to-medium-sized bugs and projects intended to
 introduce new contributors to the codebase.
 
-= Required Reading =
+= Suggested Reading =
 
 You should read the relevant coding convention documents before you submit a
 change and make sure you're following the project guidelines:
@@ -33,17 +33,3 @@ change and make sure you're following the project guidelines:
   - @{article:General Coding Standards} (for all languages)
   - @{article:PHP Coding Standards} (for PHP)
   - @{article:Javascript Coding Standards} (for Javascript)
-
-= Philosophy =
-
-The Phabricator philosophy is simple tools that work well. Performance,
-reliability, and ease of use are of paramount importance. This does not exclude
-a rich featureset, but adding features shouldn't compromise these pillars.
-
-One of Phabricator's main strengths is that it's pretty fast, but it got there
-by accepting only patches which are also pretty fast and reverting out a bunch
-of garbage that was really slow. Accepting a few slow patches undoes all this
-work, so you need to be prepared to defend the performance of your patches. The
-best way you can do this is to do your homework and come armed with concrete
-performance measurements and information (XHProf profiles, EXPLAIN for query
-plans, etc.)

src/docs/flavortext/please_please_please.diviner

@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 @title Please Please Please
 @group flavortext
 
+Please read this document.
+
 When you send a message that says "I got an error when I tried to do something":
 
 = Please Please Please =

src/docs/flavortext/project_history.diviner

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+@title Phabricator Project History
+@group flavortext
+
+A riveting tale of adventure. In this document, I refer to worldly and
+sophisticated engineer Evan Priestley as "I", which is only natural as I am he.
+
+This document is mostly just paragraph after paragraph of self-aggrandizement.
+
+= In The Beginning =
+
+I wrote the original version of Differential in one night at a Facebook
+Hackathon in April or May 2007, along with Luke Shepard. I joined the company in
+April and code review was already an established and mostly-mandatory part of
+the culture, but it happened over email and was inefficient and hard to keep
+track of. I remember feeling like I was spending a lot of time waiting for code
+review to happen, which was a major motivator for building the tool.
+
+The original name of the tool was "Diffcamp". Some time earlier there had been
+an attempt to create a project management tool that was a sort of hybrid between
+Trac and Basecamp called "Traccamp". Since we were writing the code review tool
+at the height of the brief popularity Traccamp enjoyed, we integrated and called
+the new tool Diffcamp even though it had no relation to Basecamp. Traccamp fell
+by the wayside shortly thereafter and was eventually removed.
+
+However, Diffcamp didn't share its fate. We spent some more time working on it
+and got good enough to win hearts and minds over emailing diffs around and was
+soon the de facto method of code review at Facebook.
+
+= The Long Bloat =
+
+For the next two and a half years, Diffcamp grew mostly organically and gained a
+number of features like inline commenting, CLI support and git support (Facebook
+was 100% SVN in early 2007 but 90%+ of Engineers worked primarily in git with
+SVN bridging by 2010). As these patches were contributed pretty much randomly,
+it also gained a lot of performance problems, usability issues, and bugs.
+
+Through 2007 and 2008 I worked mostly on frontend and support infrastructure;
+among other things, I wrote a static resource management system called Haste. In
+2009 I worked on the Facebook Lite site, where I built the Javelin Javascript
+library and an MVC-flavored framework called Alite.
+
+But by early 2010, Diffcamp was in pretty bad shape. Two years of having random
+features grafted onto it without real direction had left it slow and difficult
+to use. Internal feedback on the tool was pretty negative, with a lot of
+complaints about performance and stability. The internal XTools team had made
+inroads at fixing these problems in late 2009, but they were stretched thin and
+the tool had become a sprawling landscape of architectural and implementation
+problems.
+
+= Differential =
+
+I joined the new Dev Tools team around February 2010 and took over Diffcamp. I
+renamed it to Differential, moved it to a new Alite-based infrastructure with
+Javelin, and started making it somewhat less terrible. I eventually wrote
+Diffusion and build Herald to replace a very difficult-to-use predecessor. These
+tools were less negatively received than the older versions. By December 2010 I
+started open sourcing them; Haste became //Celerity// and Alite became
+//Aphront//. I wrote Maniphest to track open issues with the project in January
+or February and we open sourced Phabricator in late April, shortly after I left
+Facebook.

src/docs/flavortext/soon_static_resources.diviner

@@ -0,0 +1,123 @@
+@title Things You Should Do Soon: Static Resources
+@group flavortext
+
+
+Over time, you'll write more JS and CSS and eventually need to put systems in
+place to manage it.
+
+= Manage Dependencies Automatically =
+
+The naive way to add static resources to a page is to include them at the top
+of the page, before rendering begins, by enumerating filenames. Facebook used to
+work like that:
+
+  COUNTEREXAMPLE
+  <?php
+
+  require_js('js/base.js');
+  require_js('js/utils.js');
+  require_js('js/ajax.js');
+  require_js('js/dialog.js');
+  // ...
+
+This was okay for a while but had become unmanageable by 2007. Because
+dependencies were managed completely manually and you had to explicitly list
+every file you needed in the right order, everyone copy-pasted a giant block
+of this stuff into every page. The major problem this created was that each page
+pulled in way too much JS, which slowed down frontend performance.
+
+We moved to a system (called //Haste//) which declared JS dependencies in the
+files using a docblock-like header:
+
+  /**
+   * @provides dialog
+   * @requires utils ajax base
+   */
+
+We annotated files manually, although theoretically you could use static
+analysis instead (we couldn't realistically do that, our JS was pretty
+unstructured). This allowed us to pull in the entire dependency chain of
+component with one call:
+
+  require_static('dialog');
+
+...instead of copy-pasting every dependency.
+
+
+= Include When Used =
+
+The other part of this problem was that all the resources were required at the
+top of the page instead of when they were actually used. This meant two things:
+
+  - you needed to include every resource that //could ever// appear on a page;
+  - if you were adding something new to 2+ pages, you had a strong incentive to
+    put it in base.js.
+
+So every page pulled in a bunch of silly stuff like the CAPTCHA code (because
+there was one obscure workflow involving unverified users which could
+theoretically show any user a CAPTCHA on any page) and every random thing anyone
+had stuck in base.js.
+
+We moved to a system where JS and CSS tags were output **after** page rendering
+had run instead (they still appeared at the top of the page, they were just
+prepended rather than appended before being output to the browser -- there are
+some complexities here, but they are beyond the immediate scope), so
+require_static() could appear anywhere in the code. Then we moved all the
+require_static() calls to be proximate to their use sites (so dialog rendering
+code would pull in dialog-related CSS and JS, for example, not any page which
+might need a dialog), and split base.js into a bunch of smaller files.
+
+
+= Packaging =
+
+The biggest frontend performance killer in most cases is the raw number of HTTP
+requests, and the biggest hammer for addressing it is to package related JS
+and CSS into larger files, so you send down all the core JS code in one big file
+instead of a lot of smaller ones. Once the other groundwork is in place, this is
+a relatively easy change. We started with manual package definitions and
+eventually moved to automatic generation based on production data.
+
+
+= Caches and Serving Content =
+
+In the simplest implementation of static resources, you write out a raw JS tag
+with something like ##src="/js/base.js"##. This will break disastrously as you
+scale, because clients will be running with stale versions of resources. There
+are bunch of subtle problems (especially once you have a CDN), but the big one
+is that if a user is browsing your site as you push/deploy, their client will
+not make requests for the resources they already have in cache, so even if your
+servers respond correctly to If-None-Match (ETags) and If-Modified-Since
+(Expires) the site will appear completely broken to everyone who was using it
+when you push a breaking change to static resources.
+
+The best way to solve this problem is to version your resources in the URI,
+so each version of a resource has a unique URI:
+
+  rsrc/af04d14/js/base.js
+
+When you push, users will receive pages which reference the new URI so their
+browsers will retrieve it.
+
+**But**, there's a big problem, once you have a bunch of web frontends:
+
+While you're pushing, a user may make a request which is handled by a server
+running the new version of the code, which delivers a page with a new resource
+URI. Their browser then makes a request for the new resource, but that request
+is routed to a server which has not been pushed yet, which delivers an old
+version of the resource. They now have a poisoned cache: old resource data for
+a new resource URI.
+
+You can do a lot of clever things to solve this, but the solution we chose at
+Facebook was to serve resources out of a database instead of off disk. Before a
+push begins, new resources are written to the database so that every server is
+able to satisfy both old and new resource requests.
+
+This also made it relatively easy to do processing steps (like stripping
+comments and whitespace) in one place, and just insert a minified/processed
+version of CSS and JS into the database.
+
+= Reference Implementation: Celerity =
+
+Some of the ideas discussed here are implemented in Phabricator's //Celerity//
+system, which is essentially a simplified version of the //Haste// system used
+by Facebook.

src/docs/flavortext/things_you_should_do_soon.diviner

@@ -12,125 +12,6 @@ Then you can come back and read about these things. These are basically some
 problems you'll probably eventually encounter when building a web application
 that might be good to start thinking about now.
 
-= Static Resources: JS and CSS =
+= Things You Should Do Soon =
 
-Over time, you'll write more JS and CSS and eventually need to put systems in
+  - @{article:Things You Should Do Soon: Static Resources}
-place to manage it.
-
-
-== Manage Dependencies Automatically ==
-
-The naive way to add static resources to a page is to include them at the top
-of the page, before rendering begins, by enumerating filenames. Facebook used to
-work like that:
-
-  COUNTEREXAMPLE
-  <?php
-
-  require_js('js/base.js');
-  require_js('js/utils.js');
-  require_js('js/ajax.js');
-  require_js('js/dialog.js');
-  // ...
-
-This was okay for a while but had become unmanageable by 2007. Because
-dependencies were managed completely manually and you had to explicitly list
-every file you needed in the right order, everyone copy-pasted a giant block
-of this stuff into every page. The major problem this created was that each page
-pulled in way too much JS, which slowed down frontend performance.
-
-We moved to a system (called //Haste//) which declared JS dependencies in the
-files using a docblock-like header:
-
-  /**
-   * @provides dialog
-   * @requires utils ajax base
-   */
-
-We annotated files manually, although theoretically you could use static
-analysis instead (we couldn't realistically do that, our JS was pretty
-unstructured). This allowed us to pull in the entire dependency chain of
-component with one call:
-
-  require_static('dialog');
-
-...instead of copy-pasting every dependency.
-
-
-== Include When Used ==
-
-The other part of this problem was that all the resources were required at the
-top of the page instead of when they were actually used. This meant two things:
-
-  - you needed to include every resource that //could ever// appear on a page;
-  - if you were adding something new to 2+ pages, you had a strong incentive to
-    put it in base.js.
-
-So every page pulled in a bunch of silly stuff like the CAPTCHA code (because
-there was one obscure workflow involving unverified users which could
-theoretically show any user a CAPTCHA on any page) and every random thing anyone
-had stuck in base.js.
-
-We moved to a system where JS and CSS tags were output **after** page rendering
-had run instead (they still appeared at the top of the page, they were just
-prepended rather than appended before being output to the browser -- there are
-some complexities here, but they are beyond the immediate scope), so
-require_static() could appear anywhere in the code. Then we moved all the
-require_static() calls to be proximate to their use sites (so dialog rendering
-code would pull in dialog-related CSS and JS, for example, not any page which
-might need a dialog), and split base.js into a bunch of smaller files.
-
-
-== Packaging ==
-
-The biggest frontend performance killer in most cases is the raw number of HTTP
-requests, and the biggest hammer for addressing it is to package related JS
-and CSS into larger files, so you send down all the core JS code in one big file
-instead of a lot of smaller ones. Once the other groundwork is in place, this is
-a relatively easy change. We started with manual package definitions and
-eventually moved to automatic generation based on production data.
-
-
-== Caches and Serving Content ==
-
-In the simplest implementation of static resources, you write out a raw JS tag
-with something like ##src="/js/base.js"##. This will break disastrously as you
-scale, because clients will be running with stale versions of resources. There
-are bunch of subtle problems (especially once you have a CDN), but the big one
-is that if a user is browsing your site as you push/deploy, their client will
-not make requests for the resources they already have in cache, so even if your
-servers respond correctly to If-None-Match (ETags) and If-Modified-Since
-(Expires) the site will appear completely broken to everyone who was using it
-when you push a breaking change to static resources.
-
-The best way to solve this problem is to version your resources in the URI,
-so each version of a resource has a unique URI:
-
-  rsrc/af04d14/js/base.js
-
-When you push, users will receive pages which reference the new URI so their
-browsers will retrieve it.
-
-**But**, there's a big problem, once you have a bunch of web frontends:
-
-While you're pushing, a user may make a request which is handled by a server
-running the new version of the code, which delivers a page with a new resource
-URI. Their browser then makes a request for the new resource, but that request
-is routed to a server which has not been pushed yet, which delivers an old
-version of the resource. They now have a poisoned cache: old resource data for
-a new resource URI.
-
-You can do a lot of clever things to solve this, but the solution we chose at
-Facebook was to serve resources out of a database instead of off disk. Before a
-push begins, new resources are written to the database so that every server is
-able to satisfy both old and new resource requests.
-
-This also made it relatively easy to do processing steps (like stripping
-comments and whitespace) in one place, and just insert a minified/processed
-version of CSS and JS into the database.
-
-== Reference Implementation: Celerity ==
-
-Some of the ideas discussed here are implemented in Phabricator's //Celerity//
-system, which is essentially a simplified version of the //Haste// system used
-by Facebook.

src/docs/introduction.diviner

@@ -12,22 +12,19 @@ with teams. Phabricator is largely based on Facebook's internal tools.
 The major components of Phabricator are:
 
   - **Differential**, a code review tool; and
-  - **Diffusion**, a repository browser.
+  - **Diffusion**, a repository browser; and
+  - **Maniphest**, a bug tracker.
 
 Phabricator also includes a number of smaller tools.
 
 = Why use Phabricator? =
 
-Phabricator gives you a box of reasonably decent tools for a comparatively small
+Phabricator gives you a box of solid tools for a comparatively small setup cost.
-setup cost. Plus:
+The tools all work together and are richly integrated. The whole thing is free
-
+and open source. You own all your data. Phabricator is extremely fast and proven
-  - It has some good project names.
+to scale both to large datasets (Facebook has 500,000+ commits across many
-  - Facebook integration makes it very hip indeed.
+repositories) and large organizations (Facebook has 500+ fulltime engineers).
-  - It's fairly snappy.
+Phabricator's tools are easy to learn, understand, and use.
-  - You only have to install and configure one thing instead of setting up
-    and customizing a bunch of different things.
-  - A couple of the core tools are actually pretty good.
-  - Maniphest allows you to close tasks "out of spite".
 
 However, Phabricator may also not be a good solution for you:
 
@@ -35,7 +32,8 @@ However, Phabricator may also not be a good solution for you:
     with the toolsets you use lacking.
   - If you don't use SVN or Git, you'll have to add support for your VCS before
     you can get anywhere.
-  - If you loathe PHP, well, it's written in PHP.
+  - If you loathe PHP, well, it's written in PHP. Sorry. It is a victim of
+    circumstances. We assert it is well-written PHP, at least.
 
 = Next Steps =