Question about Source Control

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/23/2014 6:56 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 1:58 AM, Albert-Jan Roskam <fomcl at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> One more thing (so this is not entirely a double post!). While reading these books I found that the authors were pretty religious about Clean Commits. I mean, ok, it's not a good idea to do one huge monolithic commit each month, but I felt they were exaggerating. But maybe I'm wrong and clean commits become more important when the number of collaborators get bigger. It's just so easy to fix something, and e.g. correct that typo in a docstring while you're at it.
>>
>
> It's important even with a single editor. When you go back and look at
> a commit, you should be able to read the summary and know immediately
> whether a particular line in it should have been edited or not.
> Combining changes into a single commit makes that harder.
>
> Commits are cheap. Do more of 'em rather than less.

With multiple branches (as with 2.7, 3.4, and default for cpython) and 
multiple active developers (20?) commiting to those brances, commits are 
definitely not free. I would not exactly call them as cheap as you seem 
to imply either. That said, I have occasionally pushed interim changes 
that put code in an improved and stable state.

N. Coughlan has suggested improving the cpython infrastructure and 
procedures to reduce the cost of commits to encourage more people to 
make more commits (in the sense of more lines changed, not more pieces) 
and improve cpython faster.

--
Terry Jan Reedy