Last time somebody did this to me there were a lot of sit downs about how to properly chop up large scale code changes and why we don't sit on our own branch for two months.
"How long will this take to get in?"
"Well, two weeks for me to initially review it, a week for you to address all the changes, then another week or so for me to re-review it... Then of course we have to merge in all the changes that have been happening in primary..."
My team lead: "I'll 🙈 review"
lgtm
Please, no, I get flashbacks from my 6-month journey (still ongoing...) of the code review process I caused/did. Keeping PR scope contained and small is hard.
From this experience, I wish GitLab had a "Draft of Draft" to tell the reviewer what the quality of the pushed code is at: "NAK", "It maybe compiles", "The logic is broken" and "Missing 50% of the code", "This should be split into N PRs". This would allow openly co-develop, discuss, and steer the design, before moving to nitpicking on the naming, formatting, and/or documentation details of the code, which is likely to drastically change. Drafts do work for this, but the discussions can get uncomfortably long and convolute the actual finishing of the review process.
Once both reviewer(s) and the author agree on the code design, the "DraftDraft" could be collapsed into a link in an normal Draft to be mocked next. The scope of such draft would be limited by the earlier "DraftDraft".
This does seem like a potential issue if the PR is itself implementing more than one vertical slice of a feature. Then it could have been smaller and there might be wasted effort.
If the patches are small and well-organized then this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It will take more than one day to review it, but it clearly took much more time to write it.
My first PR at my current job was about 130 files for the front-end, and about 70 for the backend. This hits close to home.
Keep changes small, we use git patch stack https://github.com/uptech/git-ps
Love it when my coworkers reformat the code style, making it nigh impossible to understand what they actually changed, while greatly inflating their “contribution.”
It also blows away the git blame, making it hard to know who actually changed that one critical line of business logic 3 years ago that you need to understand before trying to fix some obscure bug.
I have one coworker who does this constantly and if you just looked at git blame, you’d think he wrote the entire code base himself.
Just one review request?
