[erlang-questions] On Pull Requests Comments

[Björn-Egil Dahlberg]

On 2013-10-21 13:31, Anthony Ramine wrote:
> I was not against pull requests in the beginning because I had gathered that whether patches were discussed on GitHub or the mailing-list was at the submitter convenience. But then every time I submitted a patch, a pull request was created for it.
Just to say why we create pull requests for most (all?) patches nowadays.

We create them because the changes are then easily put into our review 
system and we can actually keep track of them. With the ML's the patches 
can get lost in the signal/noise ratio.

We at OTP don't use GitHub for bug-tracking, we merely use GH as a 
conduit to you, the community, and it seemed like the most effective 
tool for us to do this. We can also automate certain things for it, like 
doc and build testing. Saves time.

> I don't care about pull requests for typos, but that's all they should be used for.
My thoughts on this.

I will certianly agree with you that GH has shortcomings. Especially 
with issue tracking but also with pull requests (to a lesser degree). I 
don't think we will ever use the issue tracking on GH as it is just 
plain awful for larger projects but it might be suitable for other 
things, like community driven tasks.

I don't share your concern that the history of a pull requsts can change 
or gets lost (deleted). I mean, I do belive this might happen but the 
information in a PR should translate to an OTP-ticket and all the 
relevant information should be either in the commit message or the 
ticket (or both). I view PR and ML information as transient data to 
forward the work of the patch. The relevant information should be in the 
commit message when final.

But I've certianly been the there. Pondering "what were they thinking" 
when reviewing legacy code. In Git, this information should be in the 
commit message .. not in a mail discussion (or in a PR). So if anything, 
we should be even harder on clear and informative commit messages.

I think we should give GitHub a little more time. I think pull requests 
is a nice addition as it saves time for us. ML's are just awful in this 
regard. I don't think we have found the optimal ways of working with 
GitHub, ML's and patches yet. We are still learning.

As always, your feedback is welcomed! We strive to make this better for 
all involved. =)

// Björn-Egil