About an IRC discussion on using pull requests for hg development

[Patrick Mézard]

Le 08/05/12 11:37, Martin Geisler a écrit :
> Patrick Mézard <patrick at mezard.eu> writes:
> 
>> == What caught my attention (blame me if I misunderstood)
>>
>> 1- Patchbomb is hard (Tak)
>> 2- Bitbucket/X pull requests are easier and more natural for submitters (Tak)
>> 3- Tracking what is being reviewed and what is not is difficult (marmoute)
>> 4- Submitters should not have to use mq or history rewriting tools
>> (mg, maybe Tak, others)
> 
> My problem with this is that you cannot expect people to do it right the
> first time, especially not new contributors. So we tell them "nice
> patch, but this, this, and this is wrong". Now what? ContributingChanges
> only says that people "might" find mq and record useful here.
> 
> The page doesn't say: Contributing to Mercurial absolutely requires you
> to use mq or a similar history editing extension.

It does not absolutely require it, but it is likely you will have to use them unless you do trivial things or are a genius.

Looking at ContributingChanges, there is already a lot of good things. What is missing is a section: "mpm said I should not use underscores in my method names, what now?" followed by how it is fixed in practice. And after rewriting the patch, add a note about the new version in the changelog, and pass --flag v2 to patchbomb.

Are there good tutorial about history rewriting? I am convinced the process of writing such a tutorial would help picking the right tool.

> We're sorry that the core commands in our own version control system wont be enough to let
> you contribute back to it.

Core commands are the commands newbies could use without running the risk of destroying their repository, and still manage to get some work done. But they are not good enough, far from it, Mercurial would be useless to me if limited to core commands. Why? Because "[local] history rewriting/polishing" is a *good* development practice. Clean, well-thought history is *valuable* for tons of reasons. But the tools may be rough and there is always a risk to lose data. Well, let's improve them, until we can turn them into core commands, like commit --amend.
--
Patrick Mézard