[IPython-dev] branch management getting better...

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

I just merged Vivian's editor branch (will be in beta2) after she
updated it per our review.  Many thanks, Vivian!

But I wanted to report that both a cleaner workflow on my part (I'm
finally figuring out how to use bzr right) and what I think are
improvements on launchpad itself, mean that the history is being shown
much more cleanly.  For example, if you go to:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ipython/ipython/trunk/changes

and click on the triangle for rev 1101, you'll see it shows the
topmost of Vivian's actual changes.  You can then click on that number
and you'll get:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ipython/ipython/trunk/changes/1001.2.8

So while it would be very nice if lp actually expanded the tree in the
same window, at least now it shows the various merge lines.  I also
now see how to avoid the 'dropped revisions' problem we'd been having.

The only mistake I made was to forget to call the final commit with
--author before the push

For this reason, I'd like to ask *everyone* who has commit rights to,
for a little while, work on their own branches and let me do all the
merging (I promise to be quick).  If after a few weeks this works well
for everyone, we'll document the workflow well and figure out whether
to have a single merge person or a bunch of us with a workflow we all
understand.

But by not having anyone but me merge for a few revisions, we'll avoid
the dropping of revisions we've had multiple times (it's happened to a
bunch of us).

Ultimately I actually think this may be a good way to work in the long
haul, as we move towards more regular/strict code review (which we've
already started doing recently): the person who makes the actual
merge/push is in a way 'signing' the merged work as reviewer.

This seems to give us:

- summarized view of top-level changes, with an indication of who
'signs off' on the changes.
- preservation of the individual change history/authorship for
detailed analysis when needed.

Any comments?

Cheers,

f