"File" comments all get outdated when you push anything, even if that file isn't touched

[hepcat72]

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This may make some technical sense for some reason unknown to me, but I think the retention of comments should at least be attempted if a push doesn't touch that file.

[nickkipshidze]

GitHub comments on specific lines or sections of a file are associated with a specific commit. When you push changes to a repository, GitHub creates a new commit for those changes. Even if the changes are made in a different file, the commit hash is different. If you push changes to the repository, GitHub considers the comments as associated with a previous commit, and it marks them as outdated.

I hope that helps.

[nickkipshidze]

Also, instead of commenting on specific files you can comment on whole pull request. That way it wont get marked as outdated. Using pull requests for discussions is a good practice.

[hepcat72]

Speaking to empirical observations (not to how it works), this isn't entirely true. Comments on specific lines are not outdated when those lines aren't changed. I literally just went through all the comments in a PR after a push and all the comments on specific lines were retained (not outdated), but every file comment was marked as outdated.

In our code reviews, we create issue comments on lines. Those issues are addressed and changes pushed. Comments attached to changed lines get outdated, but those not on changed lines remain.

I don't claim to know the inner workings. I'm just speaking from lots of experience using PRs for code reviews.

And when comments pertain to a file but do not have relevance to a specific line, like a discussion about why the file was added or removed, then attaching that comment to the file and not a particular line makes a lot of sense and I would argue is good practice - better than what we used to do before the ability to comment on files was introduced.

Lastly, commenting on the PR is inadequate because issues brought up there do not get a "resolve" button.

[chinanderm]

This behavior is incredible frustrating.

[hepcat72]

It's inane. I've gotten into the habit of commenting on the top line instead of using the file comment feature, since doing so almost always creates a lot of repeated work transferring comments to retain them. It's less than useless the way it is now. It actually creates braindead work.

[GarethChetwood]

That's the exact problem I'm experiencing; having to recreate comments on files after a push! It incentivises just using top-line comments (which is exactly what we were doing before this feature was added).

I appreciate why it works the way it does, based on @nickkipshidze's comment, however there must be a workaround, in its current implementation the feature is useless-adjacent.

[hepcat72]

But if that's how it works, then why are comments on lines of a file retained when that file is changed in a push to the PR (unless the comment is on changed lines)? Based on @nickkipshidze's logic, it seems like all comments on a file changed in a push should be outdated, but that's clearly not the case. Why don't the file comments work the same way we observe with comments inside the file?: retained unless the name of the file or its location changes?

[hepcat72]

I mean, why would commenting on the top line of a file produce a durable comment that persists between pushes if comments are attached to commits and I pushed a new commit?

I'm sure there's probably a technical explanation about the difference between a comment on a "line of an unchanged file" and a comment on an "unchanged file" that explains the behavior difference, but if there is, it doesn't change the fact that it makes comments "on files" more difficult to follow up on compared to comments on the top line of a file.

[tbottomparallel]

Top line commenting is not possible for submodule changes & diffs large enough that github refuses to render them. To comment on such changes in a PR you need to use the "file" comment, and it is so very incredibly annoying.

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[CollinDietz]

Commenting to say that I also want this fixed/changed

makes the on file comment feature basically useless and I default to comments on the top of files like others here

[cbeck-wandrian]

Working as intended and then silence is possibly a worse response than silence alone.

[jazithedev]

I'd like to get it fixed as well ☹️.

[IRHayfield]

I agree that GitHub should change this and make outdated comments an optional feature.
As a workaround I created outdated-parrot an action which adds all open outdated comment threads as annotations so they are displayed in the files changed view.
This is not an perfect solution, but does allow users to review comments against the correct line with the addition of some links that users may find useful.

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[cbeck-wandrian]

+1 to stop the auto-close

[hepcat72]

Meh. This isn't an issue. It's a "discussion". The "answer" is to change the feature so that comments attached to files persist through pushes the same way that in-file comments (that aren't inside changed code) do. And to be precise, the only things that should make a file-attached comment stale should be thing like:

• file name changed
• That's pretty much it

The Things that shouldn't make a comment stale are:

• changes inside the file
• Permissions change
• Deletion of the file
• moving the file

I mean, just think about it. Comments on lines of a file persist even when the line above and the line below change. You could even make a case that if the file name changes, you could keep the comment.

But the minimum bar should be: if nothing about the file changes: make the comment persist through a push.

So the result of this discussion should be the creation of an issue that establishes these new feature requirements. Then this discussion can be closed as answered.

[hepcat72]

...if an issue doesn't already exist

[beavz]

just adding a +1 that this was not the behavior that I expected - I expected file-level comments to persist through changes unless the file was deleted in the change. I'm going to have to go delete and re-create a bunch of comments (I use linked comments to create "tours" through particularly large PRs to walk reviewers and readers through the changes), and also update some external places that link to them (I'd have to do this even if I didn't change them, because the previous href to the comment no longer works). This basically makes this feature useless, imo, and I'll go back to using top-line comments 😢

[joakimtall]

What PR review software can we switch to which has not been abandoned like github?

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[queenofcorgis]

Hey there, we're going through our backlog of posts right now and I've relabelled this to product feedback, this will stop the dormancy notifications and allow our team to review. Another action will trigger a comment with more details.

[tomaskovarikeso]

@queenofcorgis Is there any progress after reviewing this? We have migrated to GitHub from Azure DevOps and so everyone in my team myself included cries for coming back. This is very frustrating. I am ok with marking the comments as outdated, because lines numbers could change and comment could appear on wrong place. But just show the outdated comments anyway, one can see it outdated and will be aware of that. Removing the comment from the latest version makes absolutely no sense.

[queenofcorgis]

For some reason the product feedback comment didn't post, I'll post below.

[queenofcorgis]

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[TobiasB9730]

Just experienced this for the first time! My workflow and use-case was:
I have taken over a huge PR, with many files touched. Irregardless of the complexities of the changes in each file, I often get overwhelmed when I see so many files changed in a PR. To create sanity for myself, I started to comment on every single file, with a summation of what had changed. As I was pretty confident that any one file would not be updated any more, I thought this would be okay. Then I touched one file, and all the file comments became outdated. So that was of course frustrating to experience 💔 Happy to see that this product feedback was submitted at least 🙏

[psech-deputy]

+1 to keep it alive.
It is frustrating to copy comments marked as outdated from the main thread and reapply them on the new commit SHA. 😠