[llvm-dev] Anyone doing code reviews via mailing lists?

Fri Apr 23 10:57:58 PDT 2021

Thanks for the feedback.  I didn’t take accessibility concerns into account.  I’ll make sure to mention it if I decide to create a proposal (which seems likely).

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Krzysztof Parzyszek  kparzysz at quicinc.com<mailto:kparzysz at quicinc.com>   AI tools development

From: Philip Reames <listmail at philipreames.com>
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2021 12:26 PM
To: Krzysztof Parzyszek <kparzysz at quicinc.com>; llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: [EXT] Re: [llvm-dev] Anyone doing code reviews via mailing lists?

If you want to propose this, please move it to a top level thread for visibility.

(My thoughts inline to help you refine your proposal.)
On 4/23/21 9:55 AM, Krzysztof Parzyszek via llvm-dev wrote:
I think we should phase-out email reviews in favor of doing it directly via Phabricator.

My reasons:

  1.  Phabricator allows for both pre- and post-commit reviews.  You can “raise concern” with any commit, including those that did not have a pre-commit review on phab.
  2.  The email-phabricator integration is still deficient despite a lot of effort having been put into it.  Moreover, it’s not likely that it will ever be fully functional.
  3.  Email communication is “fragile”. This one is based more on my personal experience, but even simply following a discussion on llvm-dev has been difficult.  I now have to use Outlook (corporate reasons…) and Outlook fails at keeping email threads together.  Replies to the same tread are scattered into a mini-forest instead staying as a single tree.  There are issues with every email client formatting the replies differently: top-post mixed with bottom-post mixed with inline text, with people quoting 500 lines of text only to insert a single-line response, and so on, and so forth.  Some of it is due to my use of Outlook, some of it is independent from it.  This “infinite flexibility” of email structure is the reason why I doubt that the Phabricator integration will ever work.
Phabricator is also fragile unfortunately.  I find phabricators inline discussions to be very hard to follow for anything which becomes involved.  As such, I tend to default to phab, but quickly move to email if discussion gets complicated.

  1.  Phabricator’s interface makes every review look the same, is readable, and doesn’t make it easy to unintentionally clutter it with junk.

As someone with vision restrictions, please be careful about this line of argument.  One of the major advantages of email is that I can use my own client at whatever zoom/scale I want.  Phab "sorta works" from an accessibility perspective, but frankly is inferior to plain old email.  I frequently end up reading phabricator emails, and then replying through the web interface.

I'm just point this out because I find that visual appear is often rated much more highly by some folks than others.  Personally, functionality is pretty much the only thing I care about.

     *   Finally, it seems like nowadays it’s easier to create a Phabricator account than to sign up to the mailing lists…

--
Krzysztof Parzyszek  kparzysz at quicinc.com<mailto:kparzysz at quicinc.com>   AI tools development

From: llvm-dev <llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org><mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> On Behalf Of Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2021 11:01 AM
To: Hubert Tong <hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com><mailto:hubert.reinterpretcast at gmail.com>
Cc: llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org><mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: [EXT] Re: [llvm-dev] Anyone doing code reviews via mailing lists?

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 8:57 AM Hubert Tong via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 11:25 AM Christian Kühnel via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
So it looks like the information we have on the mailing list and in Phabricator is diverging, as those emails do not get parsed back into Phabricator.

I recall noticing that Phabricator also doesn't emit inline code change suggestions into the e-mail record.

Yes: which is an indication that not all the content is on the mailing-list either :(

--
Mehdi

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