[cfe-dev] [RFC] Deprecate email code reviews in favor of Phabricator

[Martin Storsjö via cfe-dev]

On Mon, 3 May 2021, Krzysztof Parzyszek via cfe-dev wrote:

> Potential future direction:
> 
> This section presents a potential future evolution of the review process. 
> Christian has conducted experiments suggesting that we can replace the
> XXX-commits mailing lists with notifications directly from Phabricator:
>
>  *  For each of the mailing lists, we create a "project" with the same name
>     in Phabricator, e.g. [5]. Every Phabricator user can join/leave these
>     projects on their own. 
>  *  Everyone on these projects will receive the same email notifications
>     from Phabricator as we have on the mailing lists. This is configured via
>     "Herald" rules in Phabricator, as today, e.g. [7].
>  *  Users can reply to these email notifications and Phabricator will
>     incorporate these responses with their email client, see [6] for some
>     example emails. Quoting and markup is supported as well.
>  *  We do NOT migrate the membership lists. Users need to sign up to the
>     projects manually. We will send an email with instructions to the
>     mailing lists once everything is set up.
>  *  The current XXX-commits mailing lists will be shut down

I don't mind formalizing that reviews are done on phabricator only. 
However following projects that way would, most probably, have one 
quite notable drawback compared with the current mailing list based 
approach:

Right now, it's easy to distinguish between mails requiring different 
levels of attention; ones with me in the To or CC fields are more visible 
and I try to read all of them. I have personal Herald rules that CC me on 
topics that I track. But I also browse the rest of the mails (quickly 
glancing usually only) for other topics I might be interested in.

My suspicion is that if the mail delivery is in the form of a personal 
subscription directly from Phabricator, it becomes much harder to 
distinguish mails that stem from just following a project as a whole, vs 
ones where I'm specifically CCd.

On the other hand I guess there can be other ways of filtering the mails 
do distinguish between those cases, so maybe it would be manageable?

// Martin