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

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:30:10 -0400
Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> One other thought: IME patches in general are suboptimal to branches, so I
> think we should be encouraging people to publish their branches publicly for
> review.  A diff is a decent way to get feedback about code changes, but that's
> often only part of the work involved in deciding whether a change should be
> accepted or not.  A reviewer often wants to do a build with the changes, test
> them on various tasks and application, run the test suite, etc.  For this,
> "merge" is much better than patch(1).

When I review a patch, I will tend to assume that the poster has
already run the test suite (especially if it's another committer).
Having to checkout a branch and generate a diff myself would make it
much longer to produce a review, in most cases.

Even rebuilding a new branch from scratch can be slower than applying
the diff in an existing checkout and letting `make` rebuild a couple of
files.

Regards

Antoine.