It seems that the current "branch" field in trac serves two purposes: (a) It's a pointer to code-in-development that people who are collaborating can refer to (b) It serves as the official "to-be-merged" code once the ticket has a positive review
For purpose (a), having lots of little commits, trials, back-and-forths etc. is great and natural: the barrier for people to make their code-in-progress available to collaborators should be low. For purpose (b), however, it would be nicer if commits were in larger, semantically significant blocks, so that if someone has to do some archaeological excavations on a file, they find nice, well-defined stratifications rather than a tangled mess. We had a similar situation with trac tickets and patches: As work on a ticket progressed, one would often end up with a whole stack of patches. These would usually be consolidated into one patch once the code stabilized. We could do this with branches too: first, we'd have a "draft" branch which works as it does now. In the wrap-up of a ticket, one could make a fresh branch, rooted at some well-defined point, where the new code is now merged in some well-defined, folded commits. We wouldn't so much "rewrite" history: the draft branch would still exist. We would write a "new" history, though: we would make a "to-be-merged" branch which, while containing many of the same lines as the draft branch, would technically be independent of it. Would this be acceptable practice for people who prefer to "clean up" their commits before having them merged in a sage release or would this wreak havoc with the process somehow? (I guess if other tickets decided to base themselves on the draft branch, there might be some more merge-conflicts reported) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
