Richard Eisenberg
Hi all,
I've just reviewed !364, and it was a painful experience. Perhaps documenting why will help spur more UI innovations.
Indeed. Thanks for making sure these issues don't fall by the wayside.
I believe this is easy to fix: make the Discussions tab *chronological*. And have a link from the comment on the Discussions page to the Changes page that warps you to just the right spot in the code, with the full commentary context. (Right now, the link from the Discussions page just brings you to the file in the Changes page, not the line.)
I know this isn't the first time we've suggested this or complained, but I'm not aware of progress (or even "it's on our queue") from GitLab. Has that happened? Is there a way to prioritize this? This review process is really a drag!
Simon and I had a discussion with James Ramsey, a project manager with GitLab, around Simon's document a few months ago. They identified their first priority as work on merge queue infrastructure (another request of ours, although it's not on Simon's list); this work is tracked as gitlab-ee#9186 and a version of it will be shipped in GitLab 12.0, next month's release. James made it clear that another of his priorities for this year was to look at the current discussion interface and try to mitigate the sorts of problems that we are encountering. Simon proposed that the situation could be improved by presenting comments chronologically. James found this to be an interesting suggestion and said he would add it to his bucket of ideas. With respect to timing: There were understandably no concrete timelines given. James said that work on the discussion model would likely only happen in the second half of the year (which we are now just entering). Since then work on the merge train infrastructure has progressed a bit more slower than expected, so I suspect things may happen a bit later than expected. Moreover, neither gitlab-org&855 nor gitlab-ce#56481 have milestones yet so I expect the timescale is at least on the order of several months, unfortunately. Cheers, - Ben