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by parentheses 998 days ago
Changesets seem like a UX nightmare. While I understand the motivation, the complexity of version control today is mind boggling.

We have a working copy, index, commits, branches, remotes, pull requests - all of these come into play when proposing even the simplest change to an open source repo today. The idea that adding yet another concept to the pile will make things better is something I can't agree with.

Will it enable more capabilities? Yes. Adding features generally does that.

Aside from the "it's already complex enough" argument, there's also the fact that 90% of changes I've seen in my daily use of git don't require this feature. This means the feature will be misunderstood, misused and often not used when actually needed.

4 comments

Changesets in Gerrit are more easier to manage from processes and UX standpoint. There is no branch/commit/comment/rebase/commit/resolve-staled-comment/fight-for-true-pr-merging-strategy dance.

I'm doing a lot of review work and changesets are a killer feature not to lost in comments. Even for small-ish 50 line reviews.

Changesets especially powerful with local stack based development tools like stgit which allows to completely remove branch management.

I agree as I used a tool Reviewable which is accurate about which version of the change is being commented on, which files you reviewed etc. It even supported rebases. And no comment was finally marked resolved until the original author marked it as such.

It was great for skilled users to navigate with the keyboard and easy to see when everything was resolved. But if used as intended, like fixing some commented chunks while debating others, the information displayed became unwieldy. GitHub PR reviews are simpler and that isn't a bad thing.

Edit: looks like it's still available and hasn't changed massively, I'm not surprised as probably a lot of licensees cancelled when GitHub added reviews (my company did). Check it out if the article speaks to you.

We're still around and we've actually changed a lot. Our homepage is untouched (for now!) but you can check out our blog for proof of life :D

http://blog.reviewable.io/

Sorry, I was going off the screenshot in the home page. It's just how I remember it.
Don't forget forks lol
I completely agree.