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

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 30, 2010, at 12:04 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>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.

Yep, it depends on who is submitting the branch, what the branch changes,
etc.

>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.

You can have "co-located" branches[1] which essentially switch in-place, so if
a branch is changing some .c files, you won't have to rebuild the whole world
just to try out a patch.

-Barry

[1] I only have experience with these in Bazaar so Mercurial's might work
differently or be called something different.
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