Usability of phabricator review threads for non-phab-users

[Jonathan Roelofs]

On 7/1/14, 12:28 PM, Alp Toker wrote:
> 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).

+1

I've found this frustrating, especially coupled with the fact that folks' email 
addresses, phab usernames, and svn usernames are not always obviously related to 
each other.

It would be nice to enforce (or very strongly suggest) a bijection on phab 
usernames and svn usernames, and then display them in the tool as something 
like: `jsmith2 "John Smith" <john at smith.com>` (for some hypothetical developer).


Regards,
Jon

>
> 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
>>
>

-- 
Jon Roelofs
jonathan at codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery / Mentor Embedded