comments on summary versus commits

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 01/23/2015 04:09 PM, Jan Heylen wrote:
> Hi,

I mostly agree with your thoughts. It would be nice to have improvements 
in the areas and directions you mention.

Some quick comments:

I would like to improve Kallithea so it pushes users towards creating 
nice commits - not just piling random hacking up until it looks fine but 
has a messy history.

I think that ideally, review should happen per changeset. The full "pull 
request" diff can only be used to give a summary of what really happened.

One step in that direction would be to include some annotate information 
in the pull request diff, and instead of making comments on the pull 
request, make a comment on the PR changeset that changed the 
corresponding line. It should of course also flow in the opposite 
direction so a pull request aggregates comments from all changesets.

It would be a nice and relatively easy improvement to let the comment 
submit button check for other open comment fields on the page and prompt 
if it should submit them too and include them in the same mail. That 
should be combined with a warning when closing a window with unsaved 
comments.

Another nice improvement would be to add some diff context in the 
comment mails we send. Bonus points for grouping them together as you 
mention. The big bonus goes to making it possible to parse mails that 
are replies to a diff and makes inline comments and insert the comments 
in the right places, giving support for most of the "review happens on 
the mailing list" work flow.

One thing I hope to implement soon is some kind of "this comment needs 
action" flagging. Kind of making each comment an "issue" in a small and 
simple issue tracking system and giving an overview of which outstanding 
issues a PR has.

It would also be nice to have live updates while reviewing. Ultimately 
it would be nice to have integrated chat ... but that might be out of 
scope. Google Wave FTW!

/Mads