[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] Phabricator -> GitHub PRs?

Fedor Sergeev via llvm-dev
2020-01-23T22:29:40Z

On 1/24/20 1:11 AM, Mehdi AMINI wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 9:30 AM Fedor Sergeev via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org <mailto:llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
>
>     Hubert, thank you so much for the detailed bisection of what I
>     believe
>     is the most
>     problematic GitHub PR =<= Phab difference in terms of review
process!
>
>
> This thread has been focused on a specific aspect of the tooling /
> process, the thread we had two months ago mentioned another important
> blocker which was the support for Herald rules.
Thanks for mentioning that, though I did read that other thread and
while I agree that something like Herald is important
for many folks here wrt their review workflow organization, still would
we magically get GitHub-Herald,
these obstacles in navigation through the review comments would still be
largerly in the way of big patch series.

Email is good for notification purposes, and I do like getting it myself.
But I doubt there are many people out there who review nontrivial
changes by looking at diffs in their e-mail client,
so in my book Herald issue comes second
(that is for sure my subjective view, yet I believe it is somewhat
reasonable).

>
> It is also quite possible that there are other issues, I would be
> cautious at relying too much on the current thread to consider having
> an exhaustive list of possible issues.
I dont think that waiting for a fully exhaustive list is required to
start bothering GitHub about
pain points which have already been identified as important for the project.

regards,
   Fedor.

>
> Best,
>
> --
> Mehdi
>
>
>     Summarizing, I see two main pain points in GitHub PR experience as
>     explained here
>     that beg for improvement:
>       1. low information density of "conversation" view
>
>       2. inconvenient navigation/discovery of comments for multiple
>     commits
>     in presence of force push
>
>     As I see it, these two points will constantly get in the way of
>     review
>     process for nontrivial
>     patch series (and somehow I believe that quality of review for
>     nontrivial patches will have the
>     biggest impact on the quality of the project itself).
>
>     Do we have a good reason to believe that LLVM as  a community has
>     enough
>     weight
>     to nudge Github to really improve on these two points?
>
>     If yes, then can we start moving there? File bugs or whatnot...
>     It would be a very nontrivial effort for me to even describe the
>     problem
>     in comprehensible
>     (and non-offensive ;)  way, so I know I'm asking somebody else to
>     do the
>     hard job.
>
>     best regards,
>        Fedor.
>
>     On 1/23/20 3:02 AM, Hubert Tong via llvm-dev wrote:
>     > On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 5:19 PM David Greene
>     <greened at obbligato.org <mailto:greened at obbligato.org>
>     > <mailto:greened at obbligato.org <mailto:greened at
obbligato.org>>>
>     wrote:
>     >
>     >     Hubert Tong <hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com
>     <mailto:hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com>
>     >     <mailto:hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com
>     <mailto:hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com>>> writes:
>     >
>     >     > It was already mentioned earlier in the thread that:
>     >     > - The individual commits cannot be approved in the sense
of
>     >     approving a PR.
>     >
>     >     Later conversation makes me wonder how often that really
happens
>     >     though.
>     >     In a true patch series I would think it would be very rare to
be
>     >     able to
>     >     land a later commit before an earlier commit.
>     >
>     > I had provided the use case for a patch series where being able
>     to do
>     > so is possible (the case of related patches with little semantic
>     > ordering but is high on syntactic merge conflicts). Whether or not
>     > such a patch series qualifies as a "true" patch series
might be a
>     > philosophical discussion that could be had, but the practicality
of
>     > keeping a common dependency order was presented.
>     >
>     >
>     >     > - Comments on individual commits are easily lost.
>     >
>     >     This is the piece that I feel needs more explanation.  What
does
>     >     "lost"
>     >     mean, exactly?  I will comment more on your explanation below.
>     >
>     > "Lost" means that it becomes hard to find and track.
>     >
>     >
>     >     > To elaborate on the latter:
>     >     > - GitHub would not show comments in-line if it
unilaterally
>     >     believes that
>     >     > the comment no longer applies to the version of the code
>     you are
>     >     looking at.
>     >
>     >     Ok, but doesn't Phab do the same?  Or does Phab attach the
>     comment to
>     >     some potentially completely inappropriate line? The latter
seems
>     >     worse
>     >     to me.
>     >
>     > Phab does the latter, but you can (1) find the comment, and (2)
>     find
>     > its original context. The fact that it was on an older version
>     of the
>     > code is expressed by the shading/colour and an icon. It does not
>     make
>     > the comment hard to find like GitHub does. At some point, if a
>     force
>     > push in involved, the GitHub comments for the "replaced"
commits
>     can
>     > only be found in the long conversation view. You might have no
>     chance
>     > of seeing them presented in-line. In other words, if a single PR
is
>     > treated as a patch series, updating an early commit might orphan
>     all
>     > the in-line comments on the latter commits if a force push is
used.
>     >
>     > The long conversation view suffers from low information density
>     (needs
>     > lots of scrolling) and for single-PR-as-patch-series means that
>     > comments on different commits are interleaved. More to the
>     point: The
>     > long conversation view lacks focus and context.
>     >
>     > Replies to older comments in GitHub have a tendency to be hard to
>     > notice as well. A comment that needs pinging because people
>     missed it
>     > the first time can be pinged using the reply functionality in Phab
>     > effectively. Doing the same in GitHub might leave the ping
>     someplace
>     > where people won't see it unless if they were notified. Even
if
>     they
>     > were notified, they might not be able to find it easily except
>     through
>     > the notification.
>     >
>     >
>     >     > - GitHub would proactively hide and collapse comments in
the
>     >     "conversation
>     >     > view", especially if it believes (for such bad
reasons as line
>     >     noise in
>     >     > later commits) that an earlier comment is not relevant.
>     >
>     >     I'm reading this as comments aren't "lost"
in the sense that
>     they are
>     >     completely deleted from the PR.
>     >
>     > Yes, but comments presented without any context is not great.
>     Even if
>     > the context has not been deleted due to force push, seeing older
>     > comments in any sort of context using GitHub has required
>     opening more
>     > versions of the file in my experience than with Phab (where the
>     > comments appear "near enough" fairly often).
>     >
>     >     They may be collapsed. What does
>     >     "hide" mean?  Are they completely inaccessible?
>     >
>     > GitHub has several layers of making comments hard to find or
>     notice.
>     > Blocks of comments may become "hidden conversations" in
the
>     > conversation view (including completely new ones, e.g., if a
>     reviewer
>     > does their first pass over a patch and had a lot of comments to
>     make).
>     > This need to "load more" is presumably designed to save
on server
>     > bandwidth. Individual comments may be hidden (similar to
collapsing
>     > inline comments in Phab) as well (the comment text is folded away)
>     > because they are presumably "outdated" or
"resolved".
>     >
>     > With GitHub, "anyone" can cause comments to become less
noticeable.
>     > With Phab, it saves the state of whether inline comments are
>     collapsed
>     > by you for you.
>     >
>     >
>     >     This is an important point.  If comments are simply
>     collapsed and
>     >     I can
>     >     easily get at them if I need to, that's not too much of a
>     problem for
>     >     me.
>     >
>     > I have not found it to be easy to get to them. When requesting to
>     > "show" everything, the hidden conversations remain
hidden. I had to
>     > scroll through and "load" the blocks one by one.
>     >
>     >     After all, Phab auto-hides comments all the time if the
>     >     conversation gets "too long."
>     >
>     > Not the inline comments, and for inline comments, Phab includes
>     a bit
>     > of the comment even when collapsed. GitHub doesn't.
>     >
>     >       I am frequently annoyed by having to
>     >     un-collapse them.  Sounds like I would be annoyed in the
>     same way with
>     >     GitHub, so nothing really gained or lost to me.
>     >
>     > Uncollapsing in Phab has been much easier for me than on GitHub.
>     Also,
>     > for similarly sized reviews, I've had to uncollapse on GitHub
more
>     > often than on Phab.
>     >
>     >
>     >                              -David
>     >
>     >
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