[squeak-dev] Trunk commits

Ronald Spengler wrote:
> Ron the bug collector says:
>
> We should still collect bugs, and have a place to put them, while we're
> studying them, but we shouldn't keep them very long, as they've lots to
> do, and little time.

I agree. But I will say that I much prefer contributions that go into
the inbox and for two very simple reasons:

1) They have context. I don't need to worry whether the change conflicts
with other changes that have happened in the meantime - Monticello takes
perfectly care of that. Contrary to Mantis where you can find fixes
filed out from every Squeak version under the sun (just look at the
preamble of most fileouts) you know the definitive (package) version
this patch was made against. You also know that whoever posted the fix
must have had an image that wasn't broken beyond repair; at the very
least they were able to post it. And you know that at least it has been
loaded into a Squeak that was reasonably similar to yours (based on
package version). All of this knowledge about the patch is immensely
useful for integration.

2) It is an *extremely* efficient workflow. I can fire up Squeak, click
on the inbox repository, open it. Within three clicks I can see if there
has any actual code been contributed. It takes a lot more work than that
to find actual code on Mantis. Then there is loading. I have Monticello
already open, clicking on the package on "changes" or "merge" allows me
to review the actual code against the current version within two more
clicks. Compare this to Mantis where you'd download the fix to the
directory, open a file list, click on the file, choose "browse changes".
After loading and verifying the change there is posting it to the trunk.
Monticello is still open, unless there was a issue or I needed to merge
I can simply copy the version into the trunk with two more clicks. With
Mantis, I load the change, then I need to find which packages are
affected by it, then I need to write change log comments (possibly
copying them out of the change set preambles etc).

In other words, the integration workflow with Mantis takes me somewhere
between 10-15 minutes even for trivial fixes, including usages of
multiple tools that aren't integrated. With Monticello and the inbox the
same basic process takes me seven clicks. I've never felt anywhere near
as effective for integrating stuff.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Am 02.09.2009 um 14:30 schrieb Randal L. Schwartz: +10

I think having many commit messages is a great sign for our community.  
They are a great way to track what is being done in Squeak.

And please don't move them to another mailing list! We have already  
too many of them which increases fragmentation which is IMO one of the  
biggest challenges for the Squeak - and more general Smalltalk -  
community. I would kindly ask those who don't like the commit messages  
to use their mail client's features to handle them as they wish.

Cheers,
Bernhard

I just want to echo the approval for the commit messages.  I was just able to harvest Nicholas' changes for ScaledDecimal literal correctness.  Very very nice (no pun intended).  

On 12.09.2009, at 22:54, Eliot Miranda wrote:


http://source.squeak.org/ss.html
Package SqueakSource
Class MCDiffyTextWriter

- Bert -