On 2012-01-14, at 10:14 AM, Christian Kaltepoth wrote: > Hi all, > > I think we should talk about how contributions and patch submissions could > work in the future. > > Everybody familiar with GitHub knows pull requests which offer a great way > to submit patches to a project. But as the ASF repository doesn't offer > such a feature we should think about how we could handle contributions > while getting as much out of git as possible. > > One way to handle this is to use "git format-patch" which is able to > package a series of commits into one file (see [1] for an examle). Using > format-patch has some nice advantages over standard patch files. The major > advantage is that individual commits including their commit messages and > author are preserved. > > Creating such patches is very easy. Just create a local branch, do the > commits there and then create the patch this way: > > $ git format-patch --stdout master > ../DELTASPIKE-XXX.patch > > Applying such patches is also straight forward: > > $ git am < ../DELTASPIKE-XXX.patch > > The most important question we have to answer is if we should accept such > "git format-patch" patches in the future or if we stick with the classic > "diff" patches. > > The only reason against the "git format-patch" contributions I could think > of would be that the name of the original patch author (who is presumably > not ASF member) appears in the commit. But IMHO this shouldn't be a real > problem because the name of the committer that applied the patch is also > added (see [2] for an example).
I would argue that preserving a reference to the original contributor is very desirable. For one thing, giving credit where it's due is the fair thing to do - on the other hand, it is a good way of tracing the amount of individual contributions for non-committer contributors (e.g. before they become committers in their own right). Now, quantity is really just one of the metrics (the other one being quality, of course), but I'd say that it's still good to have this kind of stuff remembered somewhere. > > Any thoughts on this? I think we should create a wiki page for the process > however it will look like so that new contributors can get started quickly. > > Christian > > > [1] > https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12510524/DELTASPIKE-49.patch > [2] > http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-deltaspike.git;a=commit;h=becf0ff57bfbf472fc7c1e07a0c68746aa00018b > > > -- > Christian Kaltepoth > Blog: http://chkal.blogspot.com/ > Twitter: http://twitter.com/chkal
