Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
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Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#2>"Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control system is not going to fix that for you."
This guy (not the post author, but Dave Farley, the guy who wrote the above excerpt) has never heard of "trust but verify".
PR is about verifying, having another set of eyes for anythine the original dev might have missed, giving an opinion before something on a branch goes into permanent git history, and so on.
This is completely orthogonal with whether you trust your team members or not. Besides "blind trust" is not the only form of trust.
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#3> "Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control sy…
As far back as the year 2001, way before Git existed, a small startup I worked for used mandatory code review for all commits. You couldn't just upload whatever garbage and call it a day, it had to successfully compile and be reviewed by a randomly selected peer.
These days Pull Requests are used to enable the same workflow.
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#4Pull requests enforce coding conventions. The simple fact that someone is going to look at the code you're contributing is enough of an impetus to write better code. Prevents us from self rationalizing lazy decisions and the like. IMO that is really the idea, to mimic that extra level of care that is taken like when submitting to an open source project.
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#5[flagged]
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#6I’ve yet to try reviewing code locally, instead of in a browser. Does anyone here had a good experience of how to review code outside of the traditional browser based tools?
This topic reminds of something Joel Spolsky told me about Stack Exchange, in the context of social networks. Giving users the ability quote text when replying is something they really wanted to avoid because it causes arguments to devolve into semantics — far more so than if people had to write out responses in full. A tool like quote-replying shapes (and deforms) our ability to have productive debate.
The unit of change in software is a patch and yet most of us use completely different tools for writing patches, reading our own patches, and reading other peoples (IDE/editor, git diff/show, and GitHub/Lab respectively.)
I like the change of context that web based patch review gives me. I often find bugs or untidiness when looking at my own changes in a browser. When working with others, I’ve found the best code review to be about collaboration and sharing of ideas and responsibility, picking out unseen errors, adding overlooked refinements, giving advice, and improving the team’s bus factor.
If we’re supposed to be playing co-op instead of death-match, shouldn’t we all be in the same level?
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#7In OSS, after merging a PR, generally you can't get back at the author and make them do a follow-up change, because they are volunteers. A certain degree of gatekeeping is necessary. In a company however, you absolutely can just assign such a task to the author or someone else. That means it's possible to integrate changes into the main branch faster, which is very beneficial.
I've seen teams that try to mimic OSS development and only merge absolutely perfect PRs, dragging out long-living branches and integration. At some point the perfectness can't keep up with the plan, huge PRs are suddenly reviewed hastily, and the end result is worse and slower.
Bottomline: PRs can be used slightly differently in companies to improve speed and reduce overhead.
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#8IMHO PR/MRs mainly make sense specifically because git sucks for multiple people working on the same branch, so it makes more sense to split even small work items off into a separate branch.
And as an UI workflows which 'formalises' the discussion that needs to happen around a merge anyway they are quite nice.
(e.g. without PRs you still need to talk about "hey, I'm going to do this thing" => "hey this thing is ready" => "ok, let's merge this thing")
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#9[flagged]
Up to about 10 years ago I used to work on projects where up to 100 people (of those about 20 coders, the rest artists and designers) committed directly into the main branch without a formal review process, and it was ok (this was with SVN though).
Code review happened informally "after the fact", usually as the first thing in the morning when updating (each person simply looked through the changes of other people in the part of the project they felt responsible for - usually those changes were no surprises because people talked to each other before doing this).
"Post-commit" breakage was surprisingly rare, and when it happened it was quickly fixed. One just was a bit more careful checking for errors before committing changes.
I cannot imagine how this scenario could work with git though.
Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
#10> "Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control sy…
Just a small note: "trust but verify" is not a reasonable statement, and it was also unreasonable in its original context, which I encourage anyone to research.
If you can verify, trust is not required.