This looks nice, but doesn't address my main complaint with the conversation/PR system: there's no way to batch comments.
When doing code reviews, you can sometimes have upwards of 10 or 15 comments. In the current system this means 10 or 15 emails in everybody's inbox. It's also hard to work through a PR without letting everybody know when you're actually finished.
I would love to be able to comment on things as I read through them, then after I finish publish all of the changes and have them go out as one email.
Another advantage to this system is that reading and commenting becomes less prone to these sort of comments:
"Where is X defined"
"Ah I see, this is where X is defined, disregard older comment"
A publish system allows you to basically stage comments before publishing. I used rietveld before github and this alongside side by side diffs was killer.
Sounds like you want something closer to Gerrit, where you can do line-by-line code reviews on an entire commit along with an overall comment, and the whole thing goes out as one mail.
I don't get any such emails. Maybe I turned it off years ago and forgot about it. Anyways, I wouldn't let an optional setting influence the way you work.
To be clear, I find the emails very useful (this is primarily from the perspective of me using Github for work--it's nice to know when somebody has reviewed your code). But I want one, not 15, and after the code reviewer has finished.
I agree this is a big problem. I've had cases where I'm still reviewing stuff but the person whose code was under review just fixed my first few comments and then submitted it while I was still writing the rest.
I know this is partially a process problem, but having batched emails would certainly help make it more obvious.
Google's reitveld is a bit of a mess but at least it gets this part right.
You can. I had to do this because my GitHub username (like my HN one) is just my name ("rob") and I was getting notifications from people using @rob in their comments/replies instead of the person's actual GitHub username. :)
When doing code reviews, you can sometimes have upwards of 10 or 15 comments. In the current system this means 10 or 15 emails in everybody's inbox. It's also hard to work through a PR without letting everybody know when you're actually finished.
I would love to be able to comment on things as I read through them, then after I finish publish all of the changes and have them go out as one email.