RE: Pain points in PRs [was: Re: RFC: Moving git-gui development to GitHub]

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2021, 20:22 UTC
Message-ID: <6081db1246a7_127f620886@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <20210419203327.GV2947267@szeder.dev>

SZEDER Gábor wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 09:13:04AM -0800, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > > On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 7:21 AM Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Projects which switch to GitHub tend to have overall commit quality go
> > > > down IMO, because the system (a) makes it nearly impossible to review
> > > > commit messages, so people eventually degrade to writing really bad
> > > > ones,
> > > What do you mean here, exactly? In what way is it "nearly impossible"
> > > to review commit messages in GH?
> > 
> > My lengthy rant wasn't good enough for you?  ;-)  Well, I'll try even
> > harder to bore everyone to death, then and extend my rant a bit...
> 
> Thank you very much for taking the time and effort to write it up.
> 
> It summarized some of my main gripes with PR-based collaboration on
> GitHub with such clarity that I would never been able to achive.
> 
> (The recent "Pain points in Git's patch flow" thread reminded me that
> I saved this message and even marked it as important ages ago... but
> haven't gotten around to read it until now.
> 
>   https://public-inbox.org/git/YHaIBvl6Mf7ztJB3@google.com/T/
> )

People in general follow the path of least resistance; if you make X harder, people will spend more effort doing X, but they will do less of it.

People have been using email for decades, and there's all kinds of tools for dealing with it (I for example am using a free provider [Gmail], a tool to download part of my mails [mbsync], another tool to index it [notmuch], yet another tool to read it [notmuch-vim], yet another tool to write a response [vim], and I will be using another to send it [msmtp]). Or I cound simply use the Gmail app on my mobile phone.

Email is extremely convenient.

Since it's easy to reply, people do reply, often.

Which is why it's not rare at all that a patch series becomes a discussion thread, which are easy to deal with through email.

GitHub adds a layer of inconvenience, so people tend to avoid big discussions in a GitHub pull request. It's just not fun.

I also did a blog post explaining why email is just superior [1].

Two other points that were not mentioned that make email superior is that 1) you can easily cross-post, simply CC another project and that discussion spreads 2) it scales for projects that don't use GitHub; you don't need an account anywhere, and usually you don't need to subscribe to post in the mailing list.

It's no coincidence that the most successful project in history (Linux) uses email to deal with contributions: nothing else comes even close.

Cheers.

[1] https://felipec.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/why-bugzilla-sucks-for-handling-patches/

-- 
Felipe Contreras