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

[Brad Roberts]

On 6/3/2010 3:39 PM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> 
> 
> Walter Bright, el  3 de junio a las 14:16 me escribiste:
>>
>> A couple more things need to happen:
>>
>> 4. have to fold it into D1, or if it's a D1 patch, fold it into D2
>> 5. update change logs, bugzilla resolution messages
> 
> And that is (or should be) part of making the patch too, not merging it.
> If patches are not good or complete enough, you should give people
> feedback and tell them what to change to make a quality and complete
> patch, not fix the patch for them. If you do that, people will not learn
> and you will work much more than you should, as it happened when the
> back-end source was not available. I hope sometime in the future you can
> see that.
> 

You want the barrier to entry for patch creation to be as low as possible.
Every hoop you make people jump through the less likely they are to bother doing
anything.  Feedback is certainly good, and might increase the quality of the
submissions.  I'll take an incomplete fix over no fix though.

As a specific version of that, if I had to fix D1 as well, I'd likely stop
producing fixes.  My interest lies in D2 alone.  It's easy to argue that a fix
for d2 is worth having without the corresponding d1 fix.

You want the work Walter has to do to be as low as possible.  The more someone
else does the less he does and the higher the overall throughput.  There's
obvious goodness here.

Those are conflicting goals.  There's no perfect solution, but there's always
room for improvement, so it's all good.

Later,
Brad