[Python-Dev] We should be using a tool for code reviews

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 12:03, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> A problem with that is that we regularly make matching improvements to
>> upload.py and the server-side code it talks to. While we tend to be
>> conservative in these changes (because we don't control what version
>> of upload.py people use) it would be a pain to maintain backwards
>> compatibility with a version that was distributed in Misc/ two years
>> ago -- that's kind of outside our horizon.
>
> Well, I would assume people are working from a checkout. Patches from
> an outdated checkout simply would fail and that's fine by me.

Ok, but that's an extra barrier for contributions. Lots of people when
asked for a patch just modify their distro in place and you can count
yourself lucky if they send you a diff from a clean copy.

But maybe with Hg it's less of a burden to ask people to use a checkout.

> How often do we even get patches generated from a downloaded copy of
> Python? Is it enough to need to worry about this?

I used to get these frequently. I don't know what the experience of
the current crop of core developers is though, so maybe my gut
feelings here are outdated.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)