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

[Hubert Tong via llvm-dev]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 5:19 PM David Greene <greened at obbligato.org> wrote:

> Hubert Tong <hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > It was already mentioned earlier in the thread that:
> > - The individual commits cannot be approved in the sense of approving a
> PR.
>
> Later conversation makes me wonder how often that really happens though.
> In a true patch series I would think it would be very rare to be able to
> land a later commit before an earlier commit.
>
I had provided the use case for a patch series where being able to do so is
possible (the case of related patches with little semantic ordering but is
high on syntactic merge conflicts). Whether or not such a patch series
qualifies as a "true" patch series might be a philosophical discussion that
could be had, but the practicality of keeping a common dependency order was
presented.


>
> > - Comments on individual commits are easily lost.
>
> This is the piece that I feel needs more explanation.  What does "lost"
> mean, exactly?  I will comment more on your explanation below.
>
"Lost" means that it becomes hard to find and track.


>
> > To elaborate on the latter:
> > - GitHub would not show comments in-line if it unilaterally believes that
> > the comment no longer applies to the version of the code you are looking
> at.
>
> Ok, but doesn't Phab do the same?  Or does Phab attach the comment to
> some potentially completely inappropriate line?  The latter seems worse
> to me.
>
Phab does the latter, but you can (1) find the comment, and (2) find its
original context. The fact that it was on an older version of the code is
expressed by the shading/colour and an icon. It does not make the comment
hard to find like GitHub does. At some point, if a force push in involved,
the GitHub comments for the "replaced" commits can only be found in the
long conversation view. You might have no chance of seeing them presented
in-line. In other words, if a single PR is treated as a patch series,
updating an early commit might orphan all the in-line comments on the
latter commits if a force push is used.

The long conversation view suffers from low information density (needs lots
of scrolling) and for single-PR-as-patch-series means that comments on
different commits are interleaved. More to the point: The long conversation
view lacks focus and context.

Replies to older comments in GitHub have a tendency to be hard to notice as
well. A comment that needs pinging because people missed it the first time
can be pinged using the reply functionality in Phab effectively. Doing the
same in GitHub might leave the ping someplace where people won't see it
unless if they were notified. Even if they were notified, they might not be
able to find it easily except through the notification.


>
> > - GitHub would proactively hide and collapse comments in the
> "conversation
> > view", especially if it believes (for such bad reasons as line noise in
> > later commits) that an earlier comment is not relevant.
>
> I'm reading this as comments aren't "lost" in the sense that they are
> completely deleted from the PR.

Yes, but comments presented without any context is not great. Even if the
context has not been deleted due to force push, seeing older comments in
any sort of context using GitHub has required opening more versions of the
file in my experience than with Phab (where the comments appear "near
enough" fairly often).


> They may be collapsed.  What does
> "hide" mean?  Are they completely inaccessible?
>
GitHub has several layers of making comments hard to find or notice. Blocks
of comments may become "hidden conversations" in the conversation view
(including completely new ones, e.g., if a reviewer does their first pass
over a patch and had a lot of comments to make). This need to "load more"
is presumably designed to save on server bandwidth. Individual comments may
be hidden (similar to collapsing inline comments in Phab) as well (the
comment text is folded away) because they are presumably "outdated" or
"resolved".

With GitHub, "anyone" can cause comments to become less noticeable. With
Phab, it saves the state of whether inline comments are collapsed by you
for you.


>
> This is an important point.  If comments are simply collapsed and I can
> easily get at them if I need to, that's not too much of a problem for
> me.

I have not found it to be easy to get to them. When requesting to "show"
everything, the hidden conversations remain hidden. I had to scroll through
and "load" the blocks one by one.


> After all, Phab auto-hides comments all the time if the
> conversation gets "too long."

Not the inline comments, and for inline comments, Phab includes a bit of
the comment even when collapsed. GitHub doesn't.


>   I am frequently annoyed by having to
> un-collapse them.  Sounds like I would be annoyed in the same way with
> GitHub, so nothing really gained or lost to me.
>
Uncollapsing in Phab has been much easier for me than on GitHub. Also, for
similarly sized reviews, I've had to uncollapse on GitHub more often than
on Phab.


>
>                          -David
>
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