[nunez]

I'm a huge fan of Mutt and hate HTML email, but OP comes off as a kind-of curmudgeon. Reviewing pull requests semi-interactively on a browser or even though vim-diff in a single place has long beat email patch diffs for me.

Also, Drew doesn't really delve into what makes email clients "bad." Email is so much more accessible than it used to be thanks to Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail and the like. HTML allows people and companies to be creative/abusive with their email. Plain text is quite restrictive.

[cryptonector]

Suppose there was a text-based format for mixing code/patch and commentary, and that this format lent itself well to processing in such ways as:

     - merge/collate commentary (from many emails, say)
     - display source with collapsed/collapsable commentary
     - track commentary accepted/rejected/extant/addressed status
     - track commentary metadata (who, when)

Would that address your comment / needs?

I mean, I use GUI/web-y code review tools because I find them much easier to use than email, but only because the problem they solve is: keeping track of all commentary. Collating comments (and status) from many emails is a time-consuming chore -- I hate it, and it's the only reason I don't want to do code review over email, but it's the only reason I have for not wanting to do code review over email. If we can solve this problem, then I'd be ecstatic to do code review over email.

[sahil-kang]

I believe at least some of the Linux maintainers use patchwork: http://jk.ozlabs.org/projects/patchwork/

[StillBored]

But patchwork is a pale comparison to many of the web based collaborative code review tools. Its basically a patch tracker plus some simple state tracking, rather than a full blown interactive communications tool.

[cryptonector]

And PostgreSQL has a thing called commitfest, which has some simple state tracking as well, with all discussion being based on mailing-lists.

[nunez]

Yes! It would be AWESOME if it were possible to review patches and pull requests (glorified patches + git merge) from the command line. It would be nice to do this from Mutt, but the issue with Mutt is that configuring it to (a) work with MS Exchange or Gmail (less so) and (b) configuring address lookups and calendar invites so that they work seamlessly every time is a lot of work with very little love.

[funkaster]

You can prob address all those points with something similar to org-mode, or even just plain org-mode.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Plain text is quite restrictive.

Which is a good thing, most of the time.

[red75prime]

Good for what? Security thru simplicity. It's easy to make copies in postapocalyptic world, where you have only a typewriter. You don't need fancy tools to view it. Anything else?

[red75prime]

The second part is here, because I recently read too many RFCs, which were devoid of examples, explanations and hyperlinks (right, plain text). I had no other ideas why is it that way.