Add PR template encouraging inline comments over normal comments - #3717
Conversation
RFC threads are known for turning into huge messes once many comments arrive. One among many reasons for this is that the comments are entirely disorganized, which makes it very hard to keep track. I propose adding a warning the PR template that will strongly encourage people to leave inline review comments. These are significantly easier to keep track of (and can be resolved, hiding them!).
Noratrieb
added
the
not-rfc
Co-authored-by: Eric Huss <eric@huss.org>
|
I find inline comments harder enough to fiddle with that I deliberately just avoid them entirely. Particularly, I don't really read the source view of an RFC, I read the rendered view and hit "back" and then there's a box to say stuff about the RFC. Usually whatever I want to say isn't about a specific line of the text, it's about something not in the text or it's about the entire direction of th text as a whole. Also, and this is a minor thing but it's a thing, inline comments have worse preview text when you get the notification about them. |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Usually whatever I want to say isn't about a specific line of the text, it's about something not in the text or it's about the entire direction of th text as a whole.
@Lokathor Comments can be added to a file directly.
Also, and this is a minor thing but it's a thing, inline comments have worse preview text when you get the notification about them.
Agree though in general notification previews on GitHub are terrible 🤢
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I added a sentence about it
|
Alternatively, the ability to "lock" the main thread so we only use it for the FCP. |
|
Cc @rust-lang/infra for the future GitHub discussions. |
|
@Lokathor I understand that inline commens have worse UX in general, but I think that this tradeoff is worth it. |
|
Another complaint I have about inline comments is that if there are multiple comments on different threads that I haven't seen yet I might get a single notification, and it is easy to miss comments in other threads. That said, I would prefer having separate threads of conversation. I just wish GitHub comments had better UX. |
|
Yes, absolutely. Threads of conversation are good, but the GitHub notification ux for it is garbage. |
|
We discussed this pull request during @rust-lang/internal-sites triage of non-RFC PRs in #t-internal-sites > Stale non-RFC PRs @ 💬. We are somewhat inclined to accept this PR, in particular since some RFC PRs have already adopted inline comments threads. It's unfortunate that GitHub's UI for top-level comments makes topic-specific discussions so disruptive and difficult to follow, let's hope that encouraging inline comments is going to improve the experience of following an RFCs. We can always revert if it doesn't work out. Let's merge it... |
8 participants
RFC threads are known for turning into huge messes once many comments arrive. One among many reasons for this is that the comments are entirely disorganized, which makes it very hard to keep track.
I propose adding a warning the PR template that will strongly encourage people to leave inline review comments. These are significantly easier to keep track of (and can be resolved, hiding them!).
One question: who can/will approve this change? I'm just gonna go off vibes here, telling a bunch of teams about it and hoping that enough people like it that we can just ship it in and improve everyone's life!
Example (do feel free to comment normally here :D):
Important
When responding to RFCs, try to use inline review comments (it is possible to leave an inline review comment for the entire file at the top) instead of direct comments for normal comments and keep normal comments for procedural matters like starting FCPs.
This keeps the discussion more organized.