Comment by bjackman

The fundamental issue is that GitHub thinks the artifact you are reviewing is code. But the artifact I want to review is a series of commits. I make review comments like "please split this into a separate commit", "please add info XYZ to the commit message".

GitHub doesn't offer any way to review changes to those things. If the author force-pushes (which is normal and healthy if you are iterating on a series of patches, instead of on a blob of code) there's no way to diff the details I want to look at.

Compare Gerrit where for each individual commit you can diff between two versions of that commit, with a side-by-side UI showing the comments inline that the changes were made in response to.

From speaking to friends I believe this is because "why would you force-push? Just push a new commit called 'respond to review comments'". When I said "but now your commit log is a mess" they say "no, you just squash the whole PR into a single commit when you merge it. So... yes, your commit log is a mess. Bear in mind there is also no support for dependencies between PRs. So basically, you are throttled to one in-flight PR per area of work at a time. So... your commits are gonna end up being huge. Not really viable for a large project.

I have noticed that there are major projects like k8s underway on Github and they seem to get by, so maybe I'm missing something. I know that Go allow PRs but if you wanna do serious contributions they will funnel you to contribute via Gerrit instead.