[Python-Dev] We should be using a tool for code reviews

[Brett Cannon]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 13:23, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 12:03, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>>> A problem with that is that we regularly make matching improvements to
>>> upload.py and the server-side code it talks to. While we tend to be
>>> conservative in these changes (because we don't control what version
>>> of upload.py people use) it would be a pain to maintain backwards
>>> compatibility with a version that was distributed in Misc/ two years
>>> ago -- that's kind of outside our horizon.
>>
>> Well, I would assume people are working from a checkout. Patches from
>> an outdated checkout simply would fail and that's fine by me.
>
> Ok, but that's an extra barrier for contributions. Lots of people when
> asked for a patch just modify their distro in place and you can count
> yourself lucky if they send you a diff from a clean copy.
>
> But maybe with Hg it's less of a burden to ask people to use a checkout.
>
>> How often do we even get patches generated from a downloaded copy of
>> Python? Is it enough to need to worry about this?
>
> I used to get these frequently. I don't know what the experience of
> the current crop of core developers is though, so maybe my gut
> feelings here are outdated.

Well, we can start with strongly worded suggestions that patches
submitted using Rietveld will typically get priority over patches
submitted just to the issue tracker and that this means doing it from
a checkout. From there we can see if there is a drop in submissions.