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

[Duncan P. N. Exon Smith]

+cfe-dev, bcc: cfe-commits (you meant cfe-dev, right?)

> On 2014-Jul-01, at 04:11, 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.
> 
> Thanks,
> /Manuel

+1: I prefer non-phab reviews, and have caught myself skipping the ones
on phab.

It's great that you're working on this.  Mail clients seem only to get
worse at handling threads, and the features phab has for managing
patches and commits that need reviewing look promising.

These are the downsides from my perspective:

  - The email thread often doesn't have a patch attached.
  - Other emails/responses are missing.
  - Responses that are there are often duplicated (two emails per
    response).
  - Responses sometimes don't contain context.
  - Can't post patch series in single thread.

For context, my workflow for both pre- and post-commit review is to do
small reviews directly in email, and large ones by looking at the patch
and resulting commit locally (I'm far happier in my editor than a web
interface).