I don't have any giant opens source projects so I guess I don't get bothered by the +1s and cries for help. Chromium gets those on their non-github issues. So does Firefox. I'm guessing WebKit does too.
My biggest issue, which I guess is a non-issue for most others?, is I hate when reviewing a PR that every single line comment generates a message/email.
Maybe it's because I'm used to Rietveld but my normal workflow is to start reading the patch and adding comments. I might have made 10 separate line comments before I get to a part of the patch that invalidates all those comments. Therefore I don't want them sent until I'm ready. I want to be able to make line comments across all files in the PR and only when I'm ready, send them as one coherent message.
As it is now, AFAICT, the only way to do this is to write line comments in some other file on my computer and then later manually find the lines again in github and add them one at a time. Rietveld also lets you respond to line comments inline and mark them as "done".
is there anything for github that does the same? Maybe one of their offline tools?
(Code is at https://github.com/LetsUseGerrit/gerritbot for now, but I don't imagine anybody would use the code themselves... they'd only interact with it via the Github bot)
Gerrit has an excellent REST API, and because I like working with code in a terminal, I wrote Gertty -- a terminal based interface to Gerrit. It should work with the Google hosted servers.
Is there any public "how to" about Gerrit? I've interacted with it a few times for Go codereviews, but not frequently enough to get comfortable. Really simple things like finding the "submit comments" button I have to spend five minutes finding every time.
> My biggest issue, which I guess is a non-issue for most others?, is I hate when reviewing a PR that every single line comment generates a message/email.
> is there anything for github that does the same? Maybe one of their offline tools?
Nope. Even the API doesn't allow this, you can only create one "review comment" at a time and no matter how fast you create them (or if you carefully create all of them over a persistent connection) each and every one of them will generate one notification and one outbound mail.
That went pretty well the first time I tried to get a linter to annotate a PR. The annotation worked, but I discovered some people's mailboxes can not handle getting 50 mails from the same source in a fraction of a second (and oddly enough people are not fond of getting 50 one-line emails from the same place).
(I asked github support about it, they confirmed the only workaround is to not use inline comments)
I was actually shocked two weeks ago when I was talking to someone about Gerrit and they complained that their comments were never addressed. Turns out they hadn't been hitting the "Publish Comments" button, and had been assuming that every draft comment they left was being sent as an individual email.
This taught me (or reminded me of) two things:
* GitHub is so dominant that even its poor decisions are being enshrined as "the way things work"
Not github, but you may be interested in http://phabricator.org/. We hired a guy a while back who swore by it. We had too much momentum in github, so it did not catch on at our org. One of his favorite features, if I recall as it was a few years ago, is what you are talking about.
I recently switched our large-ish GitHub project to use reviewable.io for code reviews. The UI can be hard to understand sometimes, but so far everyone agrees it's a tremendous improvement over GitHub's joke of a code review UI.
Reviewable founder here. I'd love to get somebody to sit down with me and rant about the UI so I can figure out how to improve it. Let me know if you're game. :)
Besides the UI, "reviewable.io" is a memory hog. It's simply unusable if you try to browse the site from a device without a lot of free memory (e.g. older tablets, ARM SoCs, etc).
Reviewable founder here. Yep, Reviewable is a heavy client-side app, and I make no apologies for it. Mobile devices are getting powerful very quickly (you can already use Reviewable pretty much fine on modern phones/tablets) and the target audience of developers generally needs reasonably powerful devices anyway. I'd rather miss out on some users in the short term than lock myself into an obsolete server-centric architecture in the long term...
That said, performance is always an issue, it's just a question of where to set the target.
My biggest issue, which I guess is a non-issue for most others?, is I hate when reviewing a PR that every single line comment generates a message/email.
Maybe it's because I'm used to Rietveld but my normal workflow is to start reading the patch and adding comments. I might have made 10 separate line comments before I get to a part of the patch that invalidates all those comments. Therefore I don't want them sent until I'm ready. I want to be able to make line comments across all files in the PR and only when I'm ready, send them as one coherent message.
As it is now, AFAICT, the only way to do this is to write line comments in some other file on my computer and then later manually find the lines again in github and add them one at a time. Rietveld also lets you respond to line comments inline and mark them as "done".
is there anything for github that does the same? Maybe one of their offline tools?