I'm having trouble reviewing patches via email

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:03:00 -0800
"Bryan O'Sullivan" <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> I'm trying my best to review patches from people on a fairly regular basis,
> and I'm having (what feels to me like) an increasing amount of difficulty
> keeping up with them via email.
> 
> I suspect I'm not alone in this difficulty, so I thought I'd open this
> subject up for a bit of discussion.
> 
> The one thing that works sort of well about email at the moment is that
> everyone gets to see a reviewer's comments. If I think of any other
> advantages, I'll follow up with them.

Not exactly related to *reviewing* patches, but certainly related to
the process, it just occurred to me that, when viewing a changeset in
Mercurial's history, it's not obvious to find the mailing-list
discussion that led to that changeset (*).

Compare that to a bug tracker-driven workflow, where the changeset
message reads something like "issue #1234: fix the foobar", and opening
a browser to issue #1234 immediately gives the whole discussion related
to that changeset.


(*) case in point: I was looking at a79214972da2 ("chunkbuffer: use +=
rather than cStringIO to reduce memory footprint"). Searching the
commit message with Google doesn't seem to lead to the mercurial-devel
archive.

Just my 2 cents :)

Regards

Antoine.