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Comment by js2

11 hours ago

> stacked diff workflow pioneered by Phabricator

Ahem, pioneered by gerrit. But actually, I'm almost certain even that wasn't original art. I think gerrit just brought it to git.

https://www.gerritcodereview.com/about.html

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js2

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sunshowers  11 hours ago

To my knowledge, stacked diffs were first done in the Linux kernel as stacks of patches sent over email. From there they spread to Google and Facebook. (Source: I worked on Facebook's source control team from 2012-2018 and did a lot of work to enable stacked diffs there.)

  • js2  10 hours ago

    Right, I was thinking from a web-based UI. The "pull request" term is from git (AFAIK), but git itself was built to accommodate the earlier concept of mailing patches around. (Source: I've been using version control since RCS/SCCS days and contributed here and there to git in its infancy. Also an early user/contributor to Gerrit.)

  • hokumguru  7 hours ago

    Congrats and thank you. You helped build one of the best devex experiences I've ever had the pleasure of working with :)

  • p-e-w  8 hours ago

    At some point, a derivative idea becomes so different from the original one that it’s a novel idea in essence. Just like SMS is ultimately a derivative of cuneiform tablets, and yet it isn’t in any meaningful sense.

    • sunshowers  8 hours ago

      I don't think mailing stacks of patches is that different? As someone who built this stuff it was pretty obvious to me that web-based patch stack management was a relatively small evolution over mailing lists. Tools like patchwork bridged the gap initially, and we were quite familiar with them.

    • monster_truck  8 hours ago

      Imagine gettting a cuneiform tablet by courier telling you that you have unpaid parking tickets in a state you've never driven in