Usability of phabricator review threads for non-phab-users

[Alp Toker]

Specifically the problem I've been seeing is that people using the 
website are unable to CC mailing list-based developers. As a result I 
don't get copied in on responses to my review comments, and rarely get 
any kind of direct mail with threading. You end up having to dig up 
historic responses in the mailing list archive which becomes tedious.

Often the CC on website reviews will include arbitrary names of people 
who have website accounts, while excluding the actual code owners and 
recent committers who you'd expect would be relevant. This leads me to 
guess that the website is actively blocking the email addresses of LLVM 
developers from getting added to the CC list unless they open an account 
on the service.

In fact as far as I can tell, mailing list-based developers are 
*completely* excluded from the CC list visible on the website. This 
creates a really poor workflow with responses often getting missed, and 
the right people not seeing patches (and conversely, it looks like 
people who aren't really relevant end up getting pressured into 
reviewing a patch in some area).

Alp.



On 01/07/2014 14:11, Manuel Klimek 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
>

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