Making Email on Push Vastly More Useful
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We’re running GitLab Enterprise Edition 11.9.8-ee.
We have the "Emails on push" integration enabled. However, there are a few things that make this a frustrating feature:
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When a new branch is created, the email has no content, but just has "So-and-so pushed new branch ...". This means there's no way to know what was pushed with that branch. (I believe this is covered by #22736 (closed).)
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The emails contain all the changesets which happened to be pushed together. This makes it much more difficult to see what happened and often annoying (at best) when you want to send a note to the author with some questions or pointers about what was changed. This is not the same use as a merge request -- often, the author may not realize someone else has an interest in the code, or the author may not yet be posting a MR, but important points can be raised early. Both of these will lead to better code faster.
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The emails contain every commit which came into the branch because of a merge. This, combined with #2 (closed) above, means the "wheat" is overwhelmed by the "chaff".
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When an author performs a merge, and then makes their own changes, the push can contain so many changesets that it is just not possible to see the valuable changesets.
What I (and others on my team) would like to have is one email per changeset. In the case of a merge, it's OK to "lump" all the changesets that came in with the merge as a single email IFF the email is clearly and unambiguously labeled so that it can be marked by a rule in an email client, and so can be easily ignored. (Clearly, these emails can only be sent when pushed back to our GitLab instance...that's expected.)
This is important because it is the easiest, least intrusive way for allowing team members to keep up with what others are doing. Using email means we can read on our time; it's easy to set a message aside to come back to later.
The use of email notifications is, ultimately, not about collaboration. It's about communication and transparency and over all effectiveness.