On Wed, 11 Jun 2008, Doug Cutting wrote:
Also, not
all branches are of constant interest to everyone. For example, Ross
announced his C+Glib branch when he first pushed it, but we don't need
an email every time he pushes some new commits. However, if the
consensus is that we want an email sent every time someone updates a
branch, I'm happy to help set this up.
The way folks deal with this on Hadoop is with mail filters and Jira watches,
so that they see all new issue creations in Jira, but only issue updates for
issues that they've decided to watch. We should document a best-practice for
this.
I think this idiom might apply well in git land. If there were some fairly
simple web interface to "subscribe" to a head, it would be pretty useful.
For example, I care a lot about pri/eletuchy/new_erl and pri/cpiro/new_erl
but don't care a whole lot about the new ruby work going on.
As for the community impact of SVN vs git, I find as a contributor (not
committer) that git opens things up substantially for me. I am essentially
on the same playing field as the committers when it comes to new feature
development since I can easily work on a long running patch series while
continously merging in the latest master. Doing the same thing using JIRA
diffs to maintain patch series is a whole lot more complicated without
using a lot of external patch management tools.
Perhaps a hybrid model can be explored where new development branches
occur in git branches and bug fixes occur in JIRA diffs? This makes it
easy for the one-off contributor to paste in a bug-fix or simple feature
patch, but still maintains the flexibility and history-tracking ability of
git for projects with a longer timeline.
My assumption is that the long-running-patch-series type projects (e.g. C
bindings, new Erlang bindings, Ruby rewrite, etc) are primarily undertaken
by a group of core developers who have no problem learning to use and
using git. The majority of contributions from non-core contributors are
more likely to be the one-diff JIRA submissions.
Thoughts?
-Todd
