<div dir="ltr"><div>I think this reflects a different philosophy about code review. If we say that code-review is only for small-scale suggestions about the actual code changes, then yes I'd agree it's not all that useful to keep that history around. But we can (and sometimes do) have high-level architectural discussions as part of code review too, and indeed I think it's arguably the right thing to have these discussion around concrete code proposals. We keep all the discussion of the code in one place, and the discussion is attached to the evolving code patches. In this world, the code discussions really are valuable history.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Interestingly, I think this discussion has really teased out a key difference - perhaps the reason people prefer different tools here is because they're starting from different perspectives about what the tools are for? I don't think there's one true way here. Personally I've been exposed to multiple different working styles, especially having one foot in industry and one in the open-source world, and I've seen different philosophies that work. We could as a project decide that we don't want to go the way of having high-level discussion alongside code review, in which case that's OK (I would slightly prefer to move in the other direction, but that's just my preference).<br></div><div><br></div><div>Cheers</div><div>Simon</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 6 June 2018 at 12:58, Simon Peyton Jones <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com" target="_blank">simonpj@microsoft.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif">We should keep in mind, though, is that past code reviews is valuable content that we can't discard,<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Like Manuel I’m not at all sure about this.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">I *<b>do</b>* regard the Trac conversation as a long-term asset, and often refer to tickets from Notes, as a way to say “here’s a more extensive discussion of what’s in the Note”.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">But the Phab discussion of “please refactor this or that” seems far less valuable. And actually I don’t think it is substantially cross-referenced from elsewhere. Where there is substantive conversation
about the approach, I’d rather see that on Trac.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">So for me, long term access to the code-review trail is not very important<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Simon<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span lang="EN-US"> Ghc-devops-group <<a href="mailto:ghc-devops-group-bounces@haskell.org" target="_blank">ghc-devops-group-bounces@<wbr>haskell.org</a>>
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Manuel M T Chakravarty<br>
<b>Sent:</b> 06 June 2018 12:50<br>
<b>To:</b> Simon Marlow <<a href="mailto:marlowsd@gmail.com" target="_blank">marlowsd@gmail.com</a>><br>
<b>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:ghc-devops-group@haskell.org" target="_blank">ghc-devops-group@haskell.org</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [GHC DevOps Group] State of CI<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Am 06.06.2018 um 19:11 schrieb Simon Marlow <<a href="mailto:marlowsd@gmail.com" target="_blank">marlowsd@gmail.com</a>>:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif">* None of this work is GitHub specific. Nor all that CircleCI or<br>
Appveyor specific for that matter (work is currently focused on<br>
improving the test suite).<br>
* Our GitHub lock-in factor is currently low to pretty much absent,<br>
and would remain low even if the review workflow becomes more<br>
systematically GitHub centric (it already is for some small<br>
contributions).<br>
* That's because tickets remain on Trac, and the code along with the<br>
entirety of its history remains in a standard Git repository, GitHub<br>
or not. Also because GitHub is not a CI provider, those providers we<br>
do use integrate with other code hosting solutions (e.g. Appveyor with<br>
GitLab), and the surface area of CI provider-specific code is small.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif">We should keep in mind, though, is that past code reviews is valuable content that we can't discard, nor can we easily migrate it to a different code review platform. At
this point we have nearly 5K diffs on Phabricator, many of which have non-trivial code-review trails, and these are cross-referenced from Trac, emails, and other places. Even if we moved to github, we would want to keep Phabricator running so that we have
access to this content, and people will experience friction though havng to deal with another system. <span class="m_8705474613539408462apple-converted-space"> </span><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica",sans-serif">To me, the friction caused by the transition and the inability to do a clean move is more worrying than the missing code review functionality on github.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Actually, to me this is a red flag. Core reviews shouldn’t be essential documentation. I wonder what has been going wrong so that we have got to this situation.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">If important points are uncovered or documented in code reviews, that information should be included in either the source code or associated documentation. (Having git history as an important record for the evolution of the code is fine
as it is now standard to not only have one snapshot of the source, but a source control history of the source as the definitive record of a piece of software. And as we painfully discover, much in contrast to code reviews, the source control history is recorded
in a widely understood standard format.)<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Cheers,<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Manuel<u></u><u></u></p>
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