[SciPy-dev] The future of SciPy and its development infrastructure

[Pauli Virtanen]

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:58:03 -0600, Travis E. Oliphant wrote:
[clip]
> The harm is the effort to do it.    Interacting with a web-page is
> slower than svn commit.   This extra step in the process does make a
> difference when you are time-crunched.
>
>> The problem with reviewing code after commit in trunk is that it takes
>> more effort to correct or ask about dubious points.
>
> I disagree with this statement.   Why does it take more effort than
> reviewing code on the trunk?    You can do an svn diff to get the code
> changes, and do the review exactly as you could with any other tool.

I partly agree with this: if you want to immediately fix something 
"wrong" in the suggested change yourself, a web-based code review tool 
gets in the way. (But I haven't yet tried how well the command-line tool 
would work...)

But if you want to suggest some changes to the author of the commit, or 
ask some specifics, the code review tool works fairly well as a 
communication tool. Less hassle than commenting on a mailing list, and 
more organized.

I note that Github offers a similar "remarks-in-commits" feature. Could 
be worth a try to check how this works in practice.

> One way to see this is the difference between asking for permission or
> asking for forgiveness. Both have their place in social activities,
> but we shouldn't institutionalize one over the other.

Another social aspect is that asking for permission has much more 
positive connotations than asking for forgiveness.

Anyway, difficult to tell how a mandatory review policy would affect 
Scipy's development. I'd be reluctant to jump headfirst to requiring it, 
without experimenting, even if Sage and Sympy have had good experience 
about it. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to change my own workflow and 
see what happens.

[clip]
>> I've found git-svn quite good for maintaining topic branches. It can
>> switch easily between them using the same working tree, so that
>> compiles are fast, and editor just needs M-x revert-buffer.
>
> Thanks for the tip. At some point I may be able to invest some time in
> learning about git-svn. How do you switch between branches using
> git-svn.  With svn it's svn switch
> http://some-name-I-always-have-to-look-up-and-takes-time.

Check what branches you have

	git branch

Check what branches other people have

	git branch -r

Switch working tree to a different branch

	git checkout BRANCHNAME

And it's fast. I think here Git beats SVN, Bzr and Mercurial in ease of 
use. (Mercurial does have some similar features, but IMO they are a bit 
less mature.)

-- 
Pauli Virtanen