[Mailman-Developers] Feedback for mailman developers

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Feb 5, 2008, at 4:07 PM, Adrian Bye wrote:

> Hi guys (and RMS, copied),
>
> About 3 years ago I made this post:
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman
> -developers/2005-February/017850.html
>
> As a result, I get an email every 1-2 months from people asking for an
> updated patch.

It looks to me like there are really two separate unrelated features  
here.  Distributing them in the same patch would make it difficult to  
review, discuss, test and integrate, regardless of whether they are  
good ideas or not.

I would like to encourage you to develop your patches in a different  
way.  I'm not making any promises about whether they would be  
integrated if you do this, but it would make it easier for us to look  
at, and I believe easier for your to maintain separately if you decide  
to continue to do so.

I would highly recommend creating two separate Bazaar branches of the  
Mailman 2.1 code.  Each would implement just one of your features.   
You could create a third branch with the whole thing if you wanted,  
but I don't think it would be necessary.  You should then register on  
Launchpad and push these branches, publishing them in a live source  
code repository for all to see.

I'm really trying to encourage this style of development.  To me,  
patches living in a tracker is dead code.  With a published, public  
branch, the entire process is more transparent, we can easily do a  
merge and test if we wanted to look at it.  We can even find these  
branches easily via Launchpad.  And you will have an easier time  
maintaining them, because as new revisions get pushed to Mailman 2.1  
trunk, you can just merge, commit, and push to update your own branch.

If you -- or anybody else -- has questions about this workflow, please  
ping me on #mailman on irc.freenode.net.  I will happily walk you  
through it.

Cheers,
- -Barry

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