[Python-Dev] I would like an svn account (original) (raw)

Benjamin Peterson benjamin at python.org
Sat Jan 3 18:58:41 CET 2009

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

Martin v. Löwis schrieb:

I don't know about others, but downloading and applying a patch doesn't bother me (it's actually much quicker than doing a whole new SVN checkout).

Same here. In fact, when I had to backport patches before the usage of svnmerge.py, I would always apply the original patch multiple times, rather than trying to use svn merge. Integrating patches is only tedious if they don't apply cleanly anymore, in which case I usually ask the contributor to regenerate it (which they often can easily do as they had been tracking trunk in their own sandboxes).

You could clone one of the existing DCVS mirrors and open a branch on a public hosting service (bitbucket.org, launchpad, etc.). The annoying thing, though, is that it requires your co-workers to learn the DVCS in question. We (as his co-workers) would continue to request patches. So the DVCS better has a convenient way to generate a patch (even from multiple DVCS commits). I think that's what (git) people call "feature branch": a branch with the sole purpose of developing a single patch. One good thing is also that a big change is usually split up into multiple commits, and each commit can be exported as a single patch. I for one am much better at reviewing small, isolated changes, than glorious rewrites of a whole module, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. So it's much better to have a large change chunked into small, manageable bites that can even be applied individually without having to pull in everything at once.

Another advantage is the commit logs, which give the reviewer some insight into what the patch author was thinking. I groan internally whenever I see a patch which starts with 100 "-" lines followed by a complete rewrite of the code. Incremental diffs make it easier to follow the evolution of the code leading to a better review.

For patch authors, it also conferrers the beauty of version control to their work. For example, if I review dislikes the last change, it's trivial to revert.

-- Regards, Benjamin

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