[Python-Dev] Helping contributors with chores (do we have to?) (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Jun 25 05:25:17 EDT 2017

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 11:47:10 +0300 Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:

> > This is touching a more general problem, though. Before GitHub, we > (core developers) would take the patch submitted by a contributor, > make whatever minor changes were needed (e.g. Misc/NEWS) and push the > aggregate ourselves. With GitHub, while it's possible to edit someone > else's PR, it's frankly a PITA (I've tried to do it once, I don't want > to try a second time unless GitHub makes it massively easier and less > footgunning-prone).

Sorry, but how that can be true? A GitHub PR is just a git branch [...]

Well, git usage can still be a PITA, at least for a non-neligible proportion of its users. I remember trying to push some changes to someone else's PR, only to find that GitHub considered the PR had an empty diff to master. I'm not sure what produced it, but I have other things to do than deal with obnoxious tooling (be it git or GitHub) on my volunteer time.

So, my current policy with PRs where pushing changes would be required is just to look elsewhere in the hope that another core developer comes and deals with it ;-)

There're also various tools for dealing specifically with git branch layout as used by Github, and every real man writes their own (because it's easier to shoot a 5-liner than to review whether somebody else's tool do what you need or not, it's all trivial git commands anyway).

I guess I'm not a "real man" who likes to "shoot 5-liners" made of "trivial git commands" on my free time, then. For some reason I'm not even interested in becoming one. The part of computing where people posture as "real men" (or "wizards") by sequencing arcane commands on ill-conceived UIs has always felt uninteresting and hostile to me.

Regards

Antoine.

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