Hi folks,
I think it's time to bring up this issue again, as I was made aware that our LLVM instance is not the only one that has similar issues with an open source crowd that comes from email/patch based reviews: FreeBSD people have told us they have similar problems and are also running a phab instance that they have to patch for that reason. So perhaps we can now make a better case for improving the email review compatibility of phab (and accept patches to that end) :)
Why email-based reviews?
Many people have set up nicely working workflows around patch+email reviews; note that this is also an accessibility problem - I know blind people who need to do all their work in emacs, and email is much easier to handle that way than a web app.
Features needed:
- ability to enforce selecting a mailing list to cc
- replies to review comments and the patch should be in the same email
- control over what gets sent - sending everything somebody does in the app that is not relevant to the review is not adding value
We'd be happy to help with implementing things; we're looking for consensus that the feature set is desirable, and thus happiness to merge the features.
I'll lead the FreeBSD folks here in case they have more input.