Notes for DLang maintainers

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 02/28/2017 08:48 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Tuesday, 28 February 2017 at 13:10:17 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> This would be the overwhelmingly frequent case.
>> ...
>> This indicates a problem with the PR more often than not.
>
> It is unfortunate that these two seem to be true right now, so given
> that, I'll agree with you. Currently a lot of contributed code seems to
> be placed in unnecessarily large commits with minimalist commit
> messages, which would rank lather low on the quality scale of large
> established projects. Ideally changes should be split into as many
> commits as is reasonable, which by itself brings a lot of benefits, and
> described in detail (50-char summary, long description of the change,
> and change rationale). For examples, see the commit message guidelines
> of Linux, git, or really any project that's large enough to have commit
> message guidelines.

Thanks. I'd replace "changes should be split into as many commits as is 
reasonable" with "changes should be split into as many pull requests as 
is reasonable", which is a natural consequence of "most pull requests 
should consist of one commit upon merging". (Of course there may be 
several commits during PR review.)

One vs. several commits per merged pull request is a matter in which 
reasonable people may disagree, and we can't do both ways. The 
Foundation fosters that github pull requests are squashed upon merging, 
with exceptions that need to be justified.

BTW we should put this in our guidelines, we have 
https://wiki.dlang.org/Contributing_to_Phobos but not an equivalent 
covering all of dlang properties. Is there one?


Thanks,

Andrei