[Python-Dev] notifications form Hg to python-checkins

[Georg Brandl]

Am 14.07.2010 00:00, schrieb Nick Coghlan:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 23:22, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> No, I meant push. There's a separate discussion where it was pointed
>>> out that publishing each commit as a separate email makes
>>> python-checkins even chattier than it is already (this point came up
>>> after Tarek pushed a distutils2 changeset containing ~100 separate
>>> commits), so the suggestion was made to combine all commit
>>> notifications for a given push into a single email. However, I don't
>>> remember if that idea was suggested specifically to Dirkjan as a
>>> change to the notification email. If not, I'm suggesting it now :)
>>
>> As I recall, that's what I first implemented, but it was shot down by
>> some of the committers... anyway, I'd be happy to change it back.

I think I was one of the "shooters" :)

> Having seen the per-commit approach in action, I'd personally like it
> changed back to per-push notifications, but you may want to start a
> thread on python-committers about it (given the number of tangents it
> has spawned, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have stopped
> following this discussion by now).
> 
> My rationale is as follows:
> - for small changesets with only one or two changes, per-push or
> per-commit emails don't make much difference

True.

> - for large changesets, per-commit can be very noisy (as Tarek's 100+
> notifications showed) while per-push stays the same

I assume you mean large pushes, consisting of tens of changesets?  In
this case, I see several problems with a single email:

* it can get huge, and therefore a pain to load, and view in mail clients
* it's needlessly clumsy to reply to single changes, since you have to
  go and delete the thousands of lines inbetween
* there's no indication of what was pushed in the subject

I also don't think we will see pushes like Tarek's 100+ one very often for
Python.  Usually changes will be bug fixes, and unless the committer is
offline I expect them to be pushed immediately.

> I seem to have a vague recollection of the discussion you mention - do
> you remember if the specific objection was to a lack of a list of
> filenames affected in the subject line for the old per-push emails?
> Listing all the files affected by the push in the subject line would
> definitely still be desirable.

No, I think we agreed to put the (first line of the) commit message there,
which I think tells potential reviewers much better if they want to look
at that changeset.

Georg