On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:30:10 -0400
Barry Warsaw
One other thought: IME patches in general are suboptimal to branches, so I think we should be encouraging people to publish their branches publicly for review. A diff is a decent way to get feedback about code changes, but that's often only part of the work involved in deciding whether a change should be accepted or not. A reviewer often wants to do a build with the changes, test them on various tasks and application, run the test suite, etc. For this, "merge" is much better than patch(1).
When I review a patch, I will tend to assume that the poster has already run the test suite (especially if it's another committer). Having to checkout a branch and generate a diff myself would make it much longer to produce a review, in most cases. Even rebuilding a new branch from scratch can be slower than applying the diff in an existing checkout and letting `make` rebuild a couple of files. Regards Antoine.