[LLVMdev] Usability of phabricator review threads for non-phab-users

[Chandler Carruth]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com> wrote:

> Alp noted that the current setup on how phab reviews land on the list are
> not working for him. I'd be curious whether his setup is special, or
> whether there are more widespread problems. If this is more widely
> perceived as a problem, please speak up, and I'll make sure to prioritize
> the fixes (note that this is unrelated to the "lost email" problem - those
> are always highest priority and as far as I'm aware we diagnosed and fixed
> all of them within 1-2 business days).
>
> If you have the feeling that the phab email workflow makes it hard for you
> to jump into reviews, keep track of reviews, or understand reviews if
> you're not a phab user, please reply to this thread. You don't need to
> provide details, "+1", "please fix", or "doesn't work well for me" are all
> acceptable replies here - I want to get a feeling for the magnitude of the
> problem.
>

I wonder if some of this stems from approach.

Here is how I view Phab: It is a tool to help me create emails for the
email-based code review. The code review is still 100% an email code review
in my mind. I take absolutely nothing on the Phab interface as
authoritative. This isn't a knock on Phab at all, it's just that I
understand at least some of my reviewers may not be using the tool, and I
want to make sure I'm interacting reasonably with them via email.

Some consequences of this approach:

1) I always check that my scribbles in Phab show up in email. When they
don't, I stop and try to figure out what happened. Usually waiting 30
minutes results in the email showing up.

2) I work really hard when composing a review response in Phab to quote the
code in question in a way that makes my comments readable in email. I
assume that the other end of the review may not read the comments in the
web interface.

3) I always check the email thread first for comments, and then switch to
the web interface when there are code-related-comments that aren't clear in
the nice contextualized diff format that Manuel taught Phab to produce for
the emails.

4) I will often provide non-code comments in a review thread directly via
email to simplify the process. This essentially always works, and doesn't
require me to do the extra work in #1 and #2.


Not sure this email-centric workflow works for everyone, but it's been a
very pragmatic pattern for me for the past year.
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