[Distutils] Implementing large changes in small increments

[Ben Finney]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> writes:

> CPython uses the Reitveld instance integrated with bugs.python.org,
> and has the same problem as pip: incremental changes are a pain to
> publish, review, and merge, so we review and accept monolithic patches
> instead (cf the problem statement in
> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0462/)

Fair enough. I don't know of a good code review tool for Mercurial.

> While the main UI is very busy, I've actually quite liked my own
> experience with Gerrit for http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/

My understanding is that Gerrit makes it tedious to review a sequence of
revisions, in proportion to the number of revisions in the sequence. If
I understand correctly, such a sequence must have separate reviews for
every revision, and an aggregate of all the changes is not available to
the reviewer.

I'm impressed by GitLab's code review tool UI; see an example at
<URL:https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/344/diffs>.
The merge request page has tabs for the discussion, the commit log, and
the overall diff – and you choose from inline diff or side-by-side diff.

GitLab is free software, including all its tools; anyone can set up a
GitLab instance and the project data can move from one instance to
another without loss. For the purposes of the past thread where some
proposed migrating to the proprietary lock-in site GitHub, those
objections don't exist with GitLab: a project can migrate to a different
host and keep all the valuable data it accumulated.

A move to GitLab would be unobjectionable, in my view. That it has good
code review features would help the issues in this thread too.

If anyone knows of equivalent hosting for Mercurial with equivalent code
review tools under free-software terms with no lock-in, that would be
even better I think.

-- 
 \     “Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto |
  `\    standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of |
_o__)                                     incomplete ideas.” —Alan Kay |
Ben Finney