getting ready for the sprint - code review with hg

Nicolas Chauvat nicolas.chauvat at logilab.fr
Wed Feb 3 11:22:27 CST 2010


Dear List,

I am trying to do my homework before the
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/1.5sprint

I have not contributed to hg before, but I just read
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/DeveloperInfo and
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/

I have also read about the possible agenda on the sprint page and
could be interested in working on the following items:
- Improving the development process 
- Usability 
- Use of ui.progress() 

But the most interesting for me would be to work on facilitating
reviewing code with mercurial.

We currently do it with mq, but I have a strong feeling this could be
improved to become a lot more easier than it is now.

Contributors do not have write access to the project repository, but
have write access to the mq repository. Contributors work on their
patches in their own branch, then commit and push their patches.

When notified by contributors that patches are ready, reviewers pull
everything from the mq repository in one go, then jump to the right
branch and review the patches. If the patches are good, applying them
is easy. If the patches are not good, things get more complicated than
we would like them to be.

* where to put comments about patches ? we have tried logging the
  discussion about patches in a README file put in the mq repository,
  but that's not always as practical as it may sound at first.

* asking contributors to merge or split their patches is often the
  right thing to do from a reviewer's point of view, but is a bit of
  work from the contributor's point of view, especially splitting
  patches.

* making the whole review process public and beneficial to other
  contributors that are preparing patches is not trivial.

* having an archive of the reviews easily usable for further reference
  is not trivial either.

I am aware of

* http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/PatchBranchExtension

* http://arrenbrecht.ch/mercurial/pbranch/

* http://bitbucket.org/alu/hgtasks/wiki/Home

Is there any consensus about what the best option would be ? Is anyone
else interested in focusing on this topic during the sprint ? Is there
anything else I could read to be ready for the sprint ? Any thoughts,
even random ?

-- 
Nicolas Chauvat

logilab.fr - services en informatique scientifique et gestion de connaissances  


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