[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] Phabricator -> GitHub PRs?

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2020 at 16:47, Hubert Tong
<hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com> wrote:
> Except the GitHub individual commit views are rather terrible for adding comments to. The individual commits are not treated as separable commits for approval purposes, and GitHub decides on its own that freshly added comments are outdated due to surrounding noise.

True, but that's not a bad thing. As I said earlier, I don't want to
approve some commits and not others without creating a whole new
series. I think that would be similarly clumsy on either.

> That aspect of GitHub makes longer running reviews quickly unusable. It pretty much only works if all reviewers ensure that the PR originator addresses all comments before they "scroll off".

Agree.

> GitHub's UI is a screen real-estate hog due to low information density even when collapsing things that you rather should see.

With Phab I spent most of the time scrolling to find the comment box,
or the link to reopen the history because search on the comments
doesn't work.

But I don't want to drag down the details of each flaw in each tool.
What we need to do is to weigh in the major pros and cons.

GitHub PR is the "de facto standard", everyone knows, the entry cost
is practically zero. The UI is lean and missing features, but the
large availability of tooling (either targeting GitHub directly or
plain git) makes up for a lot of it.

Phab has a very complex UI with a lot of features that people have
come to rely over the years. But it's far too complex for new people
and requires specially crafted tooling to work with.

Regardless of the shortcomings of both, I think those points speak
strongly for using GitHub PRs. We can adapt to a new simplified
process, and even build tools around, that will be used by other
projects. Win Win.

cheers,
--renato