[dmd-internals] DVCS and patches feedback [was: dmd commit, revision 515]

Leandro Lucarella llucax at gmail.com
Thu Jun 3 07:28:25 PDT 2010


Brad Roberts, el  2 de junio a las 22:25 me escribiste:
> On 6/2/2010 9:22 PM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> > Trass3r, el  2 de junio a las 20:00 me escribiste:
> >>> You've been doing some great work. But the bugs are still being
> >>> filed faster than they're being fixed :-(
> >>>
> >>
> >> Maybe guys like Don and so on who have done such awesome work in the
> >> past should get commit rights to speed up the fixing process.
> > 
> > And maybe is time for a DVCS, so Don (and others) can maintain their
> > own repos (which could be tested by other people too) and Walter can
> > easily pull patches that are working fine without any effort (now
> > I guess Walter have to do the patching and commiting himself, which is
> > more time consuming than a simple pull command).
> > 
> > I think is good for consistency that there is only one person who
> > decides what goes in the official repo and what not, the problem is (I
> > guess) now that task is very time consuming. DVCS makes that very easy.
> 
> For my 2 cents:
> 
> The dcvs systems are still too user unfriendly (though git is the only one I've
> used for more than toying around, I've looked at a couple others at least a little).

I don't think they are user unfriendly, is just a mind change you have
to do. It's hard to change, it might have a steep learning curve, but
once you set your mind around it, it's really easy to use (and very
friendly, really, they put a lot of focus on usability; and I'm talking
about git too).

> Additionally, I don't find the "put ready patches in bugzilla" to be
> particularly problematic at all from my end.

Me either! I'm not suggesting stop using bugzilla at all! What I suggest
is to keep bugzilla as it is, but add a simple extra line "You can pull
this patch from my repo at URL, branch BRANCH".

The Walter's job goes from:
1) Copy the text from bugzilla
2) Open a text file
3) Paste the text
4) Save the text file
5) Apply the patch
5bis) Maybe modify the patch in some way
6) Commit, writing a commit message

To:
1) run git pull URL BRANCH

You can see the current approach is a lot of work for Walter (maybe he
has some more efficient system than this, but it's a lot of work
anyways).

There. Even more, you keep authorship information, which is lost now
(the best you can do to see who is the author of a patch is go to
bugzilla, and even then, you never know if the patch was applied as it
was in bugzilla or if it was modified by Walter).

> In some ways it's superior, being guaranteed to stick around longer
> than someone might keep a random dcvs repo around.

As I said, I think too that it's good to have the patches in bugzilla
too.

> Lastly, at least for my few contributions so far, I don't think any of
> them has gone in without at least some minor changes.

And that's another problem with the current approach, as I see it.
People making patches receive feedback very rarely. It shouldn't be
Walter who fixes the problematic patches, it should be the original
author. This way, the author can learn and improve his future patches,
and, again, Walter will have less work and could apply the patches
faster. This point could be sound insignificant, but I beg Walter to
give it a thought. Is like the issue of the source availability for the
whole compiler. At first sight it could seems to be no big deal, since
people had the front-end source and other backends to try patches out.
In reality the patch submission situation improved exponentially with
the release of the full source of the compiler. I think this issue will
have the same effect, allowing people to contribute more and better code
to the compiler.

And this last issue is independent of the DVCS, seriously Walter, please
give it a thought. I think it would be a major difference if you start
giving feedback to people about the patches and let them fix them
instead of doing it yourself.


PS: Sorry about the long e-mail =)

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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