Feedback on recent Patchwork update

[David Miller]

From: Michael Ellerman <mpe at ellerman.id.au>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2016 14:12:32 +1100

> On Tue, 2016-03-29 at 11:22 +0100, Finucane, Stephen wrote:
> 
>> I think the recently merged "shift-select" patch will help [4]. To
>> summarise, this lets you use the shift key to select a range of
>> patches and is, to me, a clear usability boost.
> 
> Yeah that would be awesome.

I very much look forward to this.

>> > 3) Comments are now after the PATCH. This is nuts. That's the first
>> > thing I want to see after the commit message! I want to see if people
>> > have reservations or major feedback about the patch before I even
>> > see the patch itself.
>> > 
>> > Do people understand this? The comments and feedback are more
>> > important than the patch itself. For example, if the kbuild robot
>> > says ANYTHING about a patch, I'm marking it as needing changes. I
>> > don't need or want to invest the time reading the patch at all when
>> > this happens.  But now I have to spend time scrolling past it, this
>> > is bad.
>> 
>> Jeremy has resolved this, and the ozlabs instance is now updated
>> to reflect this.
> 
> Personally I prefer the "old" layout (change log, comments, patch), but I think
> it's 50/50 on which is the right ordering. So I think this should probably just
> be a user preference.

When you go to a patch page you are in one of various states, but no
matter what you intend to _do_ about that patch, as many of those
"_do_" operations MUST be at the top of the page.

This means downloading the patch as an mbox file or a diff has to stay
at the top of the page like it used to be.

If I am going to the patch page to apply it, I shouldn't have to
scroll at all to download the mbox and apply the thing to my tree.

My most common situation is:

1) I know what this patch does, I read it in my inbox, I am fine
   with the implementation.

2) I already know all of the feedback was positive and just added
   ACK and TESTED-BY tags.

3) I want to process the patch to it's completion now.

The fastest way to do that is if I can go to the patch page, and click
on the download link immediately no matter how many people replied with
ACKs and signoffs.

And the only way for that to happen is if the patch download links are
at the top of the page.