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Comment by dogleash | Hacker News Reader

> It's always exciting to see new approaches to code reviews - GitHub has its strengths, but it’s far from perfect.

This is nice sentiment, it's positive reception to an idea and polite to the incumbent.

But it's so thoroughly not a new idea. It's literally the workflow git was designed to support, and is core to many long-standing criticisms about GitHub's approach for as long as GitHub has had pull requests.

And I'm over here wondering why this idea took *checks calendar* over 15 years to graduate from the denigrated mailing list degens and into hip trendy development circles.

I thought we were knowingly choosing shit workflows because we had to support the long-standing refusal by so many software devs to properly learn one of their most-used tools. That's why I chose the tools I chose, and built the workflows I built, when I migrated a company to git. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM after all.

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I mean, the answer is simple. Even if email-based flows use range-diff, which is the correct conceptual model, all the actual details of using email are, I would estimate, about 1,000x shittier in 2024 than using GitHub in 2008 when I signed up for the beta as user #3000-something.

Email flows fucking suck ass. Yes I have used them. No, I won't budge on this, and no, I'm not going to go proselytize on LKML or Sourcehut or whatever about it, in Rome I'll just do as the Romans even if I think it sucks. But I've used every strategy you can think of to submit patches, and I can't really blame anyone for not wading through 500 gallons of horrendous bullshit known as the mailing list experience in order to glean the important things from it (like range-diff), even if I'm willing to do it because I have high pain tolerance or am a hired gun for someone's project.

Also, to be fair, Gerrit was released in 2009, and as the creator of ReviewBoard (in this thread!) also noted it supports interdiffs, and supported them for multiple version control backends, was released in 2006! This was not a totally foreign concept, it's just that for reasons, GitHub won, and the defaults chosen by the most popular software forge in history tend to have downstream cultural consequences, both good and bad, as you note.

Dude, I'm not making a defense of mailing list workflows here. I'm just pondering the nature of the world where despite all the yapping about git I've seen floating around on the internet for as long as I've been lurking social media, the yappers are just recently keying in on something.

If you're asking "Why did this take 15 years for people to understand" and my reply is "Because it was under 1000 layers of other bullshit", then that's the answer to your pontification. It has nothing to do with whether you think email is good or not. You pondered, I answered. That simple.

> Because it was under 1000 layers of other bullshit

Not only because of that.

git-range-diff, while absolutely a killer feature, is a relatively new feature of git as well (a bit similarly to "git rebase --update-refs" -- which I've just learned of from you <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511241>, so thanks for that :)).

Namely, git-range-diff existed out-of-tree as "git tbdiff" <https://github.com/trast/tbdiff> originally. It was ported to git proper in August 2018 <https://github.com/git/git/commit/d9c66f0b5bfd>; so it's not a feature people could have used "15 years ago".

(FWIW, before git-range-diff was a thing, and also before I had learned about git-tbdiff, I had developed a silly little script for myself, for doing nearly the same. Several other people did the same for themselves, too. Incremental review was vital for most serious maintainers, so it was a no-brainer to run "git format-patch" on two versions of a series, and colordiff those. The same workflow is essential for comparing a backport to the original (upstream) version of the series. Of course my stupid little script couldn't recognize reorderings of patches, or a subject line rewrite while the patch body stayed mostly the same.)

> all the actual details of using email are, I would estimate, about 1,000x shittier in 2024 than using GitHub in 2008

Disagree about "all". Tracking patches in need of review is better done in a good MUA than on github. I can suspend a review mid-series, and continue with the next patch two days later. Writing comments as manually numbered, plaintext paragraphs, inserted at the right locations of the original patch is also lightyears better than the clunky github interface. For one, github doesn't even let you attach comments to commit message lines. For another, github's data model ties comments to lines of the cumulative diff, not to lines of specific patches. This is incredibly annoying, it can cause your comment for patch X to show up under patch Y, just because patch Y includes context from patch X.

Edited to add: github also has no support for git-notes. git-notes is essential for maintaining patch-level changelogs between rebases. Those patch-level changelogs are super helpful to reviewers. The command line git utilities, such as git-format-patch, git-rebase, git-range-diff, all support git-notes.

Nope, none of it was knowingly done, and plenty of teams are almost trivially convertible to the normal workflow, even without inventing a buzzword like TFA did!

Though plenty aren't. I get it. (But one of the magic phrases that really works well is "this is what git, itself, does, and there's a man page installed on your system at this very moment explaining it")

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