Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

You know what pages I'd like to be fast and performant on github? The PR discussion and diff page. When a PR gets really large (thousands of LOCs and hundreds of comments) (yes I know it's bad to do that, that doesn't help me a lot when it happens), despite them hiding everything so you need dozens of clicks in order to be able to actually read and search through it's slow as hell and it's a mess.

This is not helped by some really counter-productive events being logged interspersed with discussions e.g. any time a label is updated, that's a new line in the discussions log. Is that useful? Almost never! I can't remember wondering "wow when was this PR marked as E-Easy?" It could be useful to have a unified history of all events on the PR in a separate tab, which would include things like comment editions properly positioned in the PR timeline (instead of each comment having its own little history) for PR forensics, but the current version is just inconvenient.

Talking about, having a FAYT which can actually search through the diffs without having to first go through the entire page, find which files are not shown and forcing them to load would be super useful.

An other fun performance crater while I'm at it: when you try to create a PR github target the "default" branch. Always. Period. When you work on a project with a "long and storied" history and you're trying to do something on an old branch, or the default branch is not the development head and you're trying to create a PR to that, it will try to diff two essentially unrelated branches, take tens of seconds to create a gigantic (and completely unnecessary) log and diff, timeout half the time, and it's all for nothing, it'd be more useful to immediately give me a dropdown letting me select a target branch.

I have hit the final crater you mentioned so often, I now manually visit the url /myorg/myrepo/compare/old-master...my-new-feature to start the PR instead of clicking "Create PR" or "Compare"

I use the hub[0] cli tool to manually specify the branch when I create a PR.

[0]: https://hub.github.com/hub-pull-request.1.html

For me, I hit Command+Shift+P in VS Code, choose Open pull request, then hit Enter. As easy as it gets.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.v...

...or have even more PR functionality with https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CodeStre...

Git aliases to the rescue:

    pr !open "$(git remote -v | grep origin | grep push | cut -f 2 | cut -d " " -f 1 | sed -e "s|git@\(.*\):\(.*\).git|https://\1/\2|")/pull/new/$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

The only time I was on the GH homepage in the past.. years was when they announced that animated globe.

Agreed with the PRs. I've experienced times where typing in the description box and other actions where extremely lagged on large PRs.

Too be fair it looks like those pages are slightly above the average (mean and median) of the six sites on https://forgeperf.org/. Speaking of which it would be nice if ddevault would add each sites homepage there, just as bonus data (obviously not as useful as the stuff already there).

Is there anything novel here? GitHub is nowhere close to a delight as people make it out to be. Settling for GitHub creates as many problems as it solves. This is not a recent development, and there's nothing surprising about any of this (at least it shouldn't be considered surprising at this point).

What's interesting that if you ask people why they love GitHub, they'll probably say, "because of its community and its UI — they're great!" and if you ask people who hate GitHub why they hate it, they'll agree that it's about the community and the UI — except, from their perspective?: "They're terrible." It's not hard to figure out what's up with the disparity.

GitHub is a two-dollar bill: better than a one-dollar bill, and worse than a five.

Fair enough, but is there a viable alternative? Continuing withe the OP's main complaint: Gitlab's PR review is also slow and not even for a 1000 LOCs, feels even slower to me than Github actually.

Of course there is. There's Gitlab and Gitea, at the very least. They aren't very popular, but they don't need to be as long as signing up is easy or as long as they offer federated/social login.

What's the five-dollar bill in this metaphor? I'd like to use it. Currently my employer has told me to use a one-dollar bill. As I continue with your metaphor, I struggle to see what insight it's giving.

Critique at Google is pretty great, but internal-only. I don't know of any commercially available tools that are even close.

This commenter says reviewable.io is closeish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19102930

Creator of Reviewable here. It's been a while since I used Critique, but if anyone in the know wants to tip us off on features we're missing that would make Reviewable a "five dollar" tool we'd love to add those in!

GitLab also does the PR thing, always suggesting the default branch when there are thousands of commits between them instead of the branch that is just a fast forward.

I think the ideal scenario for the make-a-PR page would be for it to load in the commit list and diff asynchronously— so you get it quickly in the normal case where it's small, but you can just ignore the spinner and click through when it's large.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com