[Distutils] Implementing large changes in small increments (was: Getting more momentum for pip)

[Ben Finney]

Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> writes:

> Sadly with how the code in pip is written, sometimes it’s just not
> reasonable to make small PRs because things are not well factored and
> changing things requires touching a lot of different areas.

I've seen a number of other projects enforce “small revisions only,
otherwise your change gets accepted”. If actually enforced, it is a
highly successful way to get meaningful review of changes, and does not
appear to limit the scope of the eventual change.

What does end up happening in such projects (e.g., Linux) is the
community learns how to – and teaches newcomers how to – implement large
changes as smaller refactorings, each of which results in a working
system.

I think the Pip developers should not fear the loss of large changes.
Large changes can always be implemented as a series of small,
understandable changes, if skill and design effort are brought to bear.
The resulting large changes also end up being better examined and better
designed.

-- 
 \       “Well, my brother says Hello. So, hooray for speech therapy.” |
  `\                                                      —Emo Philips |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney