[erlang-questions] On Pull Requests Comments

[Fred Hebert]

It sounds to me that what would be pretty nice to have is the ability to
set comments to be uneditable in github, preserve their history, or at
the very least show that they were amended. It is a fixable problem.

I agree on the openness of the protocol, but I'm wondering if the OTP
team is seeing more contributions now that pull requests are accepted
from the github web site.

The one true objective of pull requests or mailing lists is to let the
community contribute. If the community contributes more through pull
requests than the mailing list, then we have to consider which of the
objectives between the total amount of contributions or the principles
behind the technology used are what is to be prioritized there.

You can't beat mailing lists' openness, but you may beat their user
base. This is to be confirmed, however.

Regards,
Fred.

On 10/21, Anthony Ramine wrote:
> 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
> 
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