[Gambas-user] Code Reviews

[Tobias Boege]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2012, Emil Lenngren wrote:
> 2012/8/29 Tobias Boege <taboege at ...626...>
> 
> >
> > Maybe I'm too young to be conservative, but isn't sending patches and
> > discussion just what the gambas-devel mailing list is for? User comments go
> > to gambas-user. My mail programs perform well; why bring a second tool in?
> > I can't see how it could make things better.
> >
> >
> Well.. Mailing lists are not the best platform to handle code reviews. No
> structure, only a bunch of messages.
> I think it's nice with inline comments, side-by-side diffs etc. Also that
> patches are not submitted until the discussions are done. In svn you first
> submit a patch, five minutes later the committer finds a bug but it takes a
> day to fix, so the svn trunk version is "broken" for a day.
> If you haven't, look how some of the open source projects at Google are
> code-reviewed. Golang for example.
> 
> /Emil

Yes, I strongly agree that changes should be reviewed first.

And you are right in that mailing lists are not the most convenient and a
not the least fancy way to accomplish that but the least common denominator.
And in my opinion a rather pretty one:
a) Grouping messages into threads is enough structure for my feeling.
b) Sent patches can be commented mail-inline, diff'd the way you like, etc..
Of course, this codereview tool cooks everything ready for you...

AFAICS, "The golang-dev mailing list is for discussing and reviewing code
for the Go project.", they, too, send patches inline (though, some link to
this appspot site, maybe for larger patchsets) and discuss via mail?

Being able to have multiple branches which are freely mergable from and to
other developers would be the way I would go in this regard. It would be
rather helpful if not each and every action on the repository's metadata
would immediately go through the network into the main repository... But I
understand that git may be difficult to switch to or may not be appreciated
at all - whatever.

I don't want to reject the idea of using this codereview tool and here my
constructive questions: What if someone spots a bug in some of my code and I
don't even visit that site? How could I participate without using a browser?
I.e.: Can a pipe to a mailing list be established from the codereview tool?
Sorry, it's late already and I only roughly overlooked Sebastian's manual
link.

Regards,
Tobi