Re: Development suggestions from an ENSIME developer

[Phillip Lord]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> For me, most of the work is between 1 and 2.  The decision whether the
>> patch looks good is often times not an easy one, it requires reading
>> more code than is directly affected by the patch, consult the
>> documentation, sometimes reading past discussions and bug reports,
>> sometimes trying the patched version.  That's the most time-consuming
>> part of patch review, and it isn't going to go away, nor (it seems)
>> will it be helped by the proposed changes in any way.
>
> It's no silver bullet, no.  But the question was not "will it do the
> work for me" but just "is it going to be better or worse".
> I think it's going to be marginally better.


I think neither of your mentioned "not be completely happy, and ask for
changes". Being able to do line-by-line comments is a big help. Then the
PR'er fixes, squashes. No new patch is needed, just look at the updated
state of the world.

I found when fiddling with the undo system that sometimes I didn't
understand Stefan's comments, because I wasn't sure which bit of code he
was talking about (my comprehension I am sure, rather than his
explanation).



>>> - hopefully/ideally the tool could have already checked copyright.list
>>> for you.
>> Is there any system that does?  I doubt that.
>
> Out of the box of course not.
> But if it's got enough hooks, we should be able to add it ourselves.


Copyright.list, no, undoubtly not, but other systems do indeed do CLA
signatures and checking.


>>> - "3b" can just mark the request as "reviewed by <foo>", so you can give
>>> "half-commit" rights to some users.
>>> - it sometimes makes it easier for 3rd parties (or for the reviewer) to
>>> update the merge request directly (instead of adding comments).
>> Does the above really make sense in a project where most patches get
>> reviewed by a single person?
>
> If we want to improve our commit-logs, I think we need to reduce the
> number of people who have full commit rights.  So while we probably
> wouldn't be able to make any use of "half-commit" rights right now, it
> could be very useful at some later time.

And, actually, removing full commit rights would probably *increase* the
number of commiters.

I'm still a little nervous when commit to head, because I worry about
screwing things up. Submitting a PR is much less of a nervous process. I
find this is true even for projects where I do have commit rights. Some
projects use PRs even for commiters, so everything goes through two
pairs of eyes.

Probably not going to be good for all of Emacs, but for some of it, it's
going to be good.


>>> Of course, there's also the effect on the side of the patch-submitters,
>>> where the precise flow is often made easier for them because there's no
>>> doubt about where to send the patch, in which format, etc...
>> I envision more complaints from submitters about the complexity of the
>> process...
>
> A few old timers might be annoyed, but I'd expect most other submitters
> would welcome the change.


Especially if people are familiar with it already.

Phil