2008/6/10 Alan Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I said this in a mail regarding some porting work, but I think it's of more > general relevance to committers at large. I'm a fan of integrating small, > incremental changes as early as possible rather than waiting till everything > is complete because > > - it's easier to localize problems in small changes. > - the earlier a change is committed the more it gets tested. > - it tends to reduce the probability and scope of conflicts. > - it tends to reduce the scale of "oh crap I forgot about THAT" mistakes by > identifying some problems early > > Basically, if you have a patch that does something useful, adds tests for > new functionalit and doesn't break anything else, IMO it's ready to commit. > I find it's usually worth the trouble to break big tasks into small > incremental changes. > > I understand that some jobs (e.g. porting work) are harder to break down > this way and it may not suit everybody's style, so I'm not telling anybody > what to do. I'm just saying if ever the thought "maybe I could commit this > bit separately" crosses your mind, I'm rooting for it. > > Cheers, > Alan.
I'm +1 for that Alan. To often have we all see the problem of working on a branch to add some new functionality that creeps in to fixing/adjusting/changing more things that is needed and then fighting against the moving target of the mainline. Git can help the merging way more than svn would but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still be aiming for small commits early and often. Committing to the main line also helps raise awareness of the changes are being done so they can be reviewed. Branches often get over looked in our busy schedules making the final merge commit a long and potentially error prone review. I've been wanting to start using git for a while to enable me to easily isolate my small changes as creating local branches is very cheep. Anyway, as I'm writing about git I do have a concern about the git-port repository. We do need to make absolutely sure that all code coming from is either brought in via JIRA attached patches or we try and ensure all the commiters there have a signed ICLA. It is great that we are growing the product to work on windows and Solaris but we need to ensure that no licensing issue crop up. I'm sure everything is or will be fine but we do need to be vigilant about what we commit back to the Apache repository. Regards, Martin -- Martin Ritchie
