GitHub pull requests

[Ben Gamari]

Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> writes:

> I've just finished reading this:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2hes8m/the_ghc_source_code_contains_1088_todos_please/
>
> For better or worse, I don't read reddit often enough to hold a
> conversation there, so I'll ask my question here: Is there a way we
> can turn GitHub pull requests into Phab code reviews?
> 
Since things have died down here a bit this might be a good time to
review the points made and distill some conclusions,

 1. There is a large number of people who maintain that arc poses
    a significant barrier to new contributions.

 2. Even if it weren't a significant barrier, given the small (but
    growing!) size of our contributor pool we should be reducing
    friction wherever possible

 2. Github's pull request mechanism has a great deal of mindshare, may
    cause confusion, and can't be disabled.

 3. There are varying degrees of concern that using the Github PR
    process in addition to Phab will result in confusion. This comes in
    a few flavors,

    a) Confusion between Github issue numbers, Trac bug numbers, and
       Phabricator identifiers

    b) Accepting pull requests directly may result in some users falling
       into the habit of submitting pull requests instead of Phab
       differentials
       
    c) The revision and review features of the pull request mechanism
       are inferior to those of Phab and may cost reviewers time.
    

Future steps
=============

There are are few ways forward,

 1. Do nothing, ignore pull requests as we do now

 2. Monitor Github for new pull requests and close with a message
    requesting that the user opens a differential instead

 3. Teach Phabricator to allow to submit a URL to a commit (or branch)
    in a forked github.com/ghc/ghc repo, and create a code-revision out
    of that. (suggested by hvr)
    
 4. Monitor Github for new pull requests and use facility in (3) to 
    open a differrential and close the pull request with a message
    pointing to it.
    
 5. Start accepting pull requests in addition to differentials
    (suggested by Joachim)
    
What do we think about these options?

I'd lean towards (4) and would be willing to try implementing it
assuming there is agreement that it's a reasonable way forward.

Cheers,

- Ben
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