<div class="gmail_quote">On Antoine Pitrou <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:solipsis@pitrou.net">solipsis@pitrou.net</a>></span> wrote:</div><div class="gmail_quote"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">How do you review a branch?</span></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Below is an example from github (because that's where my experience with reviewing DCVS branches comes from), but I think it communicates the idea well. </div>
<div><br></div><div>The user hsoft forked my blist project, made some changes, and sent me a request to pull from his branch. This is what I see:</div><div><a href="https://github.com/DanielStutzbach/blist/pull/30/files">https://github.com/DanielStutzbach/blist/pull/30/files</a></div>
<div><br></div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div class="gmail_quote">On Antoine Pitrou <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:solipsis@pitrou.net">solipsis@pitrou.net</a>></span> wrote:</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">You are assuming that I, as a<br>
reviewer, want to know about the history of changesets that led to the<br>
patch, but I don't: I want to read the patch as a cohesive whole, and I<br>
couldn't care less about the various typo fixes, style changes,<br>
performance tweaks that were checked in all along.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>With a branch you can easily view the full patch, making a branch strictly more general.</div><div><br></div><div>The advantage of having a branch comes when you want to review the second or third iteration of a proposed change. With a branch, you can view the diff between the latest iteration and the branch point to view the change as a cohesive whole. Or you can view the diff between the latest iteration and the last iteration you reviewed, to see if they have addressed your earlier comments or not.</div>
<div><br></div><div>You can also just tweak a few things and push the changes back to them. They can easily merge your changes with any changes they've made in the meantime (which is hard to do if you're pushing patch files around).</div>
</div><br>-- <br>Daniel Stutzbach<br>