[Python-ideas] Using only patches for pulling changes in hg.python.org

[Tarek Ziadé]

Hello,

If you follow python-checkins, you have probably notice and got
annoyed this morning my +100 checkin mails in distutils2.

I was lagging a bit on getting the GSOC students work pulled in, and,
with the DVCS effect, you get 2/3 weeks of work in hg.python.org in a
minute. :)

Once CPython itself is in mercurial, we will probably have the same
problem when people are pulling contributions. If you use a "hg pull"
command it will get all commits from the third party, even if some if
those commits are unnecessary noise, like
"I have removed this file. OOps I am putting the file back in..".

And it's not so easy to edit the incoming changelog once they are
commited. It's not easy either to use "hg incoming" because most of
the time, the third party clone has many unrelated changes. I think we
should work with queues and patches everywhere to solve this.

The idea is to have contributors handling hg patches in
bug.python.org, one patch per feature. They can use mq for that, and
the benefit will be to have a very clean history in all repositories.
A good thing about hg patches is that unlike simple diffs, the
contributor name and comment appears in the final changelog.

I would like to propose a policy for hg.python.org, based on mercurial
queues + bugs.python.org, and I would like to contribute a small guide
about it in python.org/dev.

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org