[Python-Dev] Using feature branches for local development

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 09:28:28 -0400
Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > The mercurial-recommended way is that you just push your changes to cpython
> > when done, which puts all your individual commits into Python's history.
> >
> > I tried to find an official statement on which way it should be in the
> > devguide, but couldn't find anything.
> 
> It's definitely the latter, but I don't think it is explicitly
> documented yet that this applies to all pushes, not just patches from
> the tracker.

I think we (python-dev) will need to take a decision on this.

My personal opinion is that we don't want to see all intermediate
commits which led to a patch (or feature) in the main repo. It may
also lead to many spurious buildbot builds (some of them probably
failing), and many commit notifications on python-checkins: you could
see an example of the latter with the distutils2 pushes.

The counter-argument is that preserving the development history can
make changes more understandable. That's only if the history reflects
the logical separation of changes, though.

If someone wants to split their work into several changesets, a patch
series using mq could also be the recommended way (that's how
mercurial-devel works).

Regards

Antoine.