Re: strings assignment fix

[John W. Eaton]

On  1-Oct-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 3:26 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| > On  1-Oct-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
| >
| > | Since my write access to savannah is now working, I've applied the
| > | changeset myself.
| >
| > Thanks, I just had not gotten to the point of applying the patch yet.
| >
| > But since I've been using the archive on savannah as a mirror of my
| > local archive, I wasn't actually expecting anyone else to write to it
| > so I'm glad I noticed this message from you before I tried pushing to
| > the archive or I would have been surprised to find that changes had
| > been made to it.
| >
| 
| I hope I didn't do any damage; however, I think mercurial by default
| denies a push that would create multiple remote heads, just because of
| this danger.

No, there was no damage, and it's OK that you made those changes.  I'd
just like to agree on some guidelines before we start working this way
regularly (which is something that I'm all in favor of).

| I'm all for that. The two changesets I pushed today seemed quite
| harmless, so I decided to go ahead and maybe save you some work.
| 
| So you have already set up rule 1:
| 
| 1. Don't create multiple heads (Mercurial warns if you're about to. So
| don't use push --force)
| 
| now, what about:
| 2. Always try make & make check with at least one configuration
| (trying multiple is of course out of most people's reach)

Yes, it's bad when a change causes build failures, so that should be
avoided if possible.  But problems like this are likely to happen
occasionally anyway.

| 3. Small fixes may be pushed without approval; other fixes, extensions
| or other modifications should be posted to ML for discussion &
| approval.
| (We can leave "small" vague or define it somehow).

Yes.

I think we might start with the GCC guidelines for patches here:

  http://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html

and the guidelines for write access to the source archive here:

  http://gcc.gnu.org/svnwrite.html

I know these will need to be modified for Octave, and that you have
already written some contributor guidelines which may cover some of
these topics.

jwe