[Python-Dev] My patches

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Oct 30, 2008, at 11:04 AM, A.M. Kuchling wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:04:42AM +0000, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> One of the reasons why I'm very keen on us moving to a distributed  
>> version
>> control system is to help break the logjam on core developers.   
>> True, your
>> code will still not be able to land in the "official" branch  
>> without core
>> developer intervention, but you will be able to share your code,  
>> fixes,
>> branches with everyone in a much more live way than patches in a  
>> tracker.
>
> I don't see how a DVCS will fix anything.  The bottleneck is in
> assessing patches for inclusion in the master tree; not enough people
> are doing that.  We'd just end up with lots of proposed branches
> waiting to be merged, instead of patches to be applied.

I disagree.  Dealing with patches is much more painful than dealing  
with branches.  A patch is a dead thing sitting in a tracker.  They  
easily get out of date, are difficult to apply and update, etc.  Live  
branches are much easier to review, update, track changes in the  
trunk, and share.

Yes, it still means we'll have a lot of branches to review, but the  
overhead of reviewing them and shepherding them to landing will go down.

> (What a DVCS might enable is making it easier to do larger
> experiments, like the recent Vmgen work, and publish them in a form
> that people can download.  We could create SVN branches now, but that
> means people would then have commit access to all of the Python
> source.)

A dvcs means that people can publish their branches in a wide variety  
of ways.  Trusted developers can push their branches to  
code.python.org.  Non-core developers can use one of the free public  
dvcs branch hosting service.  Industrious users can self-publish their  
branches.  Anyone with email can bundle a branch and send it via a  
smart email package (much different than just-a-patch).

This means both large and small experiments are very easy to perform.   
So are small branches that fix a particular bug or add a small  
feature.  In a good dvcs, branches are very cheap to make and share,  
regardless of whether you're a core developer or a casual hacker.

- -Barry

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