[petsc-dev] Our pull request work flow is terrible and horrible

[Jed Brown]

"Smith, Barry F." <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>> On Jan 12, 2018, at 5:47 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>>>   Hmm, now there are two things to keep track of for each pull request
>>>> (the pull request web page and the issue web page) so you've doubled the
>>>> pain just so you can use the bitbucket issue assigner to know who is
>>>> assigned to it.
>>>> 
>>> I meant to suggest to do this only for "not actively trying to merge" PRs
>>> that you want to take off the PR page and convert to issues.
>> 
>> FWIW, GitHub pull requests can be assigned and also track which named
>> reviewers have entered reviews.  Users can also get a unified summary of
>> review requests and assigned issues/PRs across all projects.
>> 
>> https://github.com/pulls/review-requested
>> https://github.com/pulls/assigned
>
>    Sadly you cannot reply to previous comments for Github PRs, there
>    is just a mass of unorganized previous comments. If this is fixed
>    then Github becomes more desirable looking.

I think it was an intentional choice to try to keep discussions on
topic, while fully threaded discussions tend to fragment into
sub-discussions.  Supporting that fragmentation is something email does
quite well.  FWIW, GitLab has a two-level threading concept (instead of
arbitrarily deep nesting).

I usually review commits and use line comments for specific issues.
Github does that fine.  That general discussion of issue is not threaded
is mildly annoying sometimes, but in my experience not actually an
issue.