[erlang-questions] On Pull Requests Comments

[Anthony Ramine]

Hello,

I don't like the switch to GitHub pull requests and I argued about it in a nondescript pull request that was made for one of my patches.

I could just link to it [1] but as there is no guarantee about comments in GitHub's system, I will copy and paste what I wrote there:

> Otherwise while pull requests are good in theory, @OTP-Maintainer gives a good example of where it sucks big time, you have to take care of formatting your emails etc, and Markdown is underspecified. I would rather have plain text emails which I can browse offline. I don't even have my own comments received by email when using pull requests, that's splitting information.
> 
> We gave up on standard email protocols to use a proprietary forum, this sucks.
> 
> Also, while someone can't delete an email that I have already received, anyone can delete a comment he made on GitHub. I fail to see that as an improvement.
> 
> And people can also amend their comments whenever they want, this is insane.


Please do not try to make me believe that amending of comments is harmless and won't be a reality. When I look at the amount of aggressivity that is shown around here sometimes, I can't even begin to fathom what can happen when discussion can be altered after the fact at any given point in time.

Please don't tell me either that learning Markdown is easy. Just take a look at big profile repositories like the OS X package manager Homebrew: most bug reports and build logs are never properly formatted and you end up with unusable garbage where even squinting your eyes won't help. Nobody care about properly formatting comments.

You can't beat mailing-lists' openness.

Regards,

[1] https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/103#issuecomment-26706198

-- 
Anthony Ramine