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

[Duncan P. N. Exon Smith]

> On 2014-Jul-01, at 13:02, Sean Silva <chisophugis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Jonathan Roelofs <jonathan at codesourcery.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> +1
>  
> 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).
> 
> 
> I don't think that enforcing username conventions is the right solution though. Personally I think the easiest and most convenient thing is to just be able to use an email address and have phab treat that interchangeably with the phab username (or even as the canonical name with the phab username as a convenient alias). I think this is what bugzilla does and it seems to work well.

+1

> Also, it would be nice if essentially everywhere that the phab username is displayed it just used the real name. (the real name is going to end up in the commit somehow anyway)
> 
> -- Sean Silva