save multiple comments at once

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 01/27/2015 06:27 PM, Sean Farley wrote:
> Andrew Shadura writes:
>
>> On 27 January 2015 at 14:11, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I agree. Md/RST is something that's generally useful and improves the 
>> readability. It should probably be a per-instance or per-repository 
>> setting, I guess. 

Well ... there are apparently different opinions on that ;-)

I can also not deny that some people like it and use it. There are also 
some people who like to send html mails with fancy layout ;-)

> I don't understand Mads issue with this, actually. I think a config knob
> is overkill because Md/ReST is a superset of just plain text.

No, it is not just a superset. It is reducing the set of valid plain 
text inputs and allocating the rest for its own purpose. It only become 
a superset by redefining what "plain text" is.

Plain text can contain (almost) any sequence of characters. The markup 
languages will redefine the rendering of some of the valid plaint texts. 
In a code review system it will often contain code that happens to mean 
something in the markup language ... or perhaps is markup code that you 
want to discuss. That means the user who just wants to throw a comment 
also has to learn the markup language and remember that it no longer is 
ascii wysiwyg but he has to preview before saving.

We had the existing markup feature enabled for more than a year. It 
seems like nobody ever used it. Nobody complained when we removed it, 
but we stopped getting complaints from developers who didn't want to 
learn the markup language and about code snippets in comments being 
unreadable.

> I agree with Nick: there needs to be a way to insert code snippets.

Yes. And I think that should be the default. Other interpretation should 
be opt-in.

I think that if we want to support creating comments with fancy layout, 
then we should have a wysiwyg editor and/or give the user the option of 
using his favourite markup language.

If people really started using it, then I would prefer to have a mode 
where I didn't have to look at it but just got a text rendering with 
relevant link markup.

> Same with links.

URLs, @mentions and revision hashes in text can with sufficiently high 
reliability be recognized in text and marked up as links without 
influencing the rendering ... and the failure mode where something 
incorrectly is marked up as a link is no problem at all.

/Mads