The thing that's really legacy in GitHub is the code review flow, which is likely one of the surface areas that corporate customers use the most.
Actions and Codespaces have been huge and transformative, so it's disappointing that core functionality like code reviews hasn't seen the same level of improvement.
Basic features that Phabricator had nearly a decade ago are still missing:
- highlighting copied/moved code blocks
- gutter indicators for code coverage
- stacked diffs
- not collapsing large changes by default (what a ridiculous default! "A lot of code has changed here, meaning it's likely bugs may be here - I'll hide that for you to make your review easier!")
And I don't recall how well Phabricator supported it, but handling rebases sanely by carrying over comments and showing diffs from prior PR versions across rebases would be amazing. The number of times I have to re-review an entire PR in GitHub because it can't show what changed since the last review if the author rebases their branch...
To be fair, they did improve several things in the PR flow over the last decade but there's definitely a lot more that could be done. I just hope they keep their API team well-resourced so that code review tools like Graphite and Reviewable can keep working! (Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Reviewable.)
This is 100% true. For some reason GitHub has put very little love into code review even though the Pull Request is probably their most important flow.
The good news is that many people have built better code review interfaces on top of GitHub. My favorites:
- CodeApprove (I created it, so yeah I like it)
- Graphite
- Reviewable
- GitContext
Check them out! You’d be surprised how much better they are and how quick they are to set up.
Actions and Codespaces have been huge and transformative, so it's disappointing that core functionality like code reviews hasn't seen the same level of improvement.
Basic features that Phabricator had nearly a decade ago are still missing: - highlighting copied/moved code blocks - gutter indicators for code coverage - stacked diffs - not collapsing large changes by default (what a ridiculous default! "A lot of code has changed here, meaning it's likely bugs may be here - I'll hide that for you to make your review easier!")
And I don't recall how well Phabricator supported it, but handling rebases sanely by carrying over comments and showing diffs from prior PR versions across rebases would be amazing. The number of times I have to re-review an entire PR in GitHub because it can't show what changed since the last review if the author rebases their branch...