PR usage by people with commit access

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 5 November 2016 at 08:33, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
> Now that we've converted to GitHub, I am automatically receiving emails about each pull request submitted to the MacPorts repositories, and each comment that's made on them. I've tried to participate in some of those, providing feedback on individual lines that are wrong, but it's a lot of work, and often involves follow-up questions from the contributor. And I assume my comments are only seen by the submitter of that pull request and anyone else watching that pull request, and the (I anticipate) very small number of developers watching all pull requests.

The number might not be small (most committers were probably
subscribed), but it will certainly decrease as we get more pull
requests and almost none of the non-committers are subscribed (which
are usually the ones who would benefit from those reviews most).

> So I have the impression that my feedback is reaching fewer viewers and is thus a worse use of my time.

I wonder if  there is a solution for that. (Something like a special
button that says "send this part of the review to the mailing list".
Maybe there's a way to provide some "hook" to send any reviews that
are considered useful to the mailing list automatically, perhaps based
on some special keywoard that we would put to reviews.)

> Since the conversion to GitHub, I'm receiving several hundred emails a day, which is not a quantity that I'm going to be able to keep up with. I'm probably going to unsubscribe from notifications for new pull requests, and continue to provide email feedback based on what gets pushed to the repository and posted to macports-changes.

If you can manage to review all commits (which I always found
extremely impressive), you could also check new pull requests every
now and then even if you are not subscribed and just point out some
most obvious problems before they end up live in the repository.

But I admit that dealing with all the traffic will be tough.

Mojca