[IPython-dev] Pull request workflow...

[Fernando Perez]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For the record, my apologies for this. I've not really used a DVCS before,
> and I was thinking in terms of diffs (i.e. minimising the difference between
> my branch and trunk), rather than changesets. It's been a learning
> experience. :-)

There is no need to apologize, if anything I feel bad for apparently
picking on you, it's just that it was a very recent and relevant
example (right at the top of the log).  If you want to see ugly, look
at the mess Brian and I made last year:

http://i.imgur.com/KGYgs.png

(and that's with gitg collapsing part of the tree with arrows!).

We've all made mistakes, and it's very important that the project
remains *open and friendly* to people making mistakes.  If we're
afraid to try anything new or a little crazy, we'll never come up with
anything interesting!

That doesn't mean being sloppy, but it does mean that we should be far
more tolerant of the occasional mistake that requires a little bit of
cleanup, than creating an atmosphere where people are afraid to try
things out because they will be beaten up by an enforcement police.

Particularly with DVCS, it's much harder to cause real lasting damage.
 And even if there is damage to the history, ultimately it's not that
big of a deal.  When we moved from svn to bzr we actually had a nasty
actual *break* in the history because I wasn't careful enough when
doing the final integration:

http://i.imgur.com/JOz8U.png

But at that point Ville had spent a bunch of time working with bzr,
and the benefits of moving over to a dvcs outweighed the cost of the
break in the dag.  I didn't have time to learn how to replay the
history (I don't even know if it could be done in bzr) so we just
moved ahead.  The code written in that period and the time invested by
the developers has a lot more value tha keeping the DAG police happy
:)

So as you can tell, if anything the worst mistakes we've had all have
my name somewhere nearby.  And that's OK.  Like in climbing: if you're
not falling, you're not trying anything hard :)

Regards,

f