Re: pull requests

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 27/03/2020 09.30, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2020 09:00:10 -0400
>>
>> On 27/03/2020 03.54, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> More importantly, given that I did a review
>>> of such a remote branch, how do I communicate my comments so that they
>>> are recorded for posterity?  Probably by email, so that doesn't seem
>>> to solve the main problem of avoiding email in the patch submission
>>> and review workflow.
>>
>> Assuming you use the web UI, you can typically attach comments to code 
>> regions.
> 
> And how does one point to such past discussions, or more generally
> make sure they end up in some centralized place we could later
> revisit?

These comments survive even after the pull request is merged, so the tracker 
that hosted the discussion and the code comments acts as that centralized place.

Here is a good example, from GTK, which moved to gitlab a while ago with the 
rest of Gnome: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1158 (gitlab 
calls them "merge requests")

On that page you can see many sections that say `… started a thread on an 
outdated change`.  This means that a project maintainer (or anyone, really) 
commented on part of the patch, then the original patch author (or anyone able 
to push to the corresponding branch) updated the code (hence the "outdated" 
part — but note that the diff under discussion is still available).  The part 
that says `Resolved by … 4 months ago' means that the author or the original 
commenter indicated that the particular point under discussion had been 
resoled, so that discussion is now hidden by default to reduce noise.

Here is another example, from nautilus: 
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests/417.  In both cases 
the changes have been applied to the master branch ("merged"), but the 
discussion persists in the tracker.

HTH,
Clément.