Re: On committing significant and/or controversial changes

[Björn Bidar]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Ship Mints <shipmints@gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:47:22 -0500
>> Cc: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> Considering how cheap git branches are, I would add that contributors could 
>> create a branch with their
>> potentially controversial changes committed in the branch for people to 
>> better appreciate vs. users
>> speculatively applying patches in their own private branches.
>
> Branches are "cheap" to create, but are "expensive" because too many
> active branches tend to increase the probability of mistakes when
> people push changes to the wrong branch or merge from/to the wrong
> branch.

Rules on such branches should help for example for Glibc there are rules
for namespace specifically to avoid this kind of issue.[1]

These test branches exist to experiment, create commits such as fixup
commits that won't reflect the actual commits that would be merged after
the changes in said branch would be in a working state.


> Branches also make it a bit harder to track changes people install.

It depends on how they are organized. E.g. if topic branches are merged
into master which only contain extra commits related to that topic they
are easy to track. However if a topic branch contains merge commits
where they should have been rebased first before merging instead of
merging mater back then these can cause unnecessary noise in the commit
history.

> So I don't think I like this proposal for changing our procedures.

Change is hard but without change issues will potentially keep existing.
Making use of features that different systems offer can help to relieve
some of the friction and make communication of changes easier.

It would be best to take the things learned by people outside of the
personal bubble into account. Often they can show use things that we
have become blind to or would have never thought of in the first place.


[1] https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/GlibcGit#Branch_Name_Space_Conventions