llvm dev - Apr 2021 - Anyone doing code reviews via mailing lists?

It's not uncommon to have email responses to phab emails that don't make
it into the web interface.  A recent example is D99976.

There's also a bunch of post commit discussion which happens entirely in 
email.  Check any of the commit threads with responses in the last 
week.  There are many.

Philip

On 4/23/2021 2:49 AM, Christian Kühnel via llvm-dev
wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I just read in our Code Review policy 
>
<https://llvm.org/docs/CodeReview.html#what-tools-are-used-for-code-review>,
> that contributors can also do the code reviews on the mailing lists. I 
> checked the XXX-commits mailing list archives since Feb 1st 2021 and 
> could not find any code review there. I only found automatic emails 
> from Phabricator reviews or git commits.
>
> Is anyone actually doing code reviews on the mailing list any more?
> Can you send me a link to a recent example?
>
> If nobody is doing code reviews on the mailing lists any more, we 
> could also remove it from our policy...
>
>
> Best,
> Christian
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
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Thx Philip,

for sharing this. That helped me better understand how people are
interacting with the mailing lists!
> It's not uncommon to have email responses to phab emails that don't
make
> it into the web interface.  A recent example is D99976.
>
I missed those when scanning the lists! I was looking for a code review
that *started* on the mailing list, but that assumption was wrong.

So it looks like the information we have on the mailing list and in
Phabricator is diverging, as those emails do not get parsed back into
Phabricator. Which is unfortunate as folks not following the llvm-commits
mailing lists (like me) will then not see discussions happening there.

However I do understand that it's sometimes more convenient to reply via
email client than via Phabricator. It looks like Phabricator would
actually support
this
<https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/configuring_inbound_email/>.
Not sure how difficult it would be to set that up.
> There's also a bunch of post commit discussion which happens entirely
in
> email.  Check any of the commit threads with responses in the last week.
> There are many.
>
Same here: I missed the replies to commit messages. Here's one example
<https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20210419/906894.html>
in
case someone else is interested.

Discussions about commits could also happen on Phabricator. You can also
reply to commits there, e.g.
https://reviews.llvm.org/rG2f67267a93c87261414a4aa4c6cb9d20a489a0df But
again I understand it is more convenient to do that via an email client.

My conclusions:

   1. Code reviews don't usually **start** on the mailing list.
   2. Folks do use the mailing lists to reply to commit and review emails,
   so we still need those.
   3. For the future we might want to look into parsing these replies back
   into Phabricator to get a consistent view there. Not sure how hard that
   would be to set up.



Best,
Christian
>
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