Re: patch submission process, was Re: [PATCH v6 06/16] merge_recursive: abort properly upon errors

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 3, 2016, 16:56 UTC
Message-ID: <20160803165652.zek5df7tv5reg6w4@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbn19aj5t.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 09:53:18AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> > Leaving aside Dscho's questions of whether pulling patches from email is
> > convenient for most submitters (it certainly is for me, but I recognize
> > that it is not for many), I would much rather see incremental fixup
> > patches from you than whole "here's what I queued" responses.
> 
> Ah, yes, I misspoke.  It should be either an incremental diff or
> in-line comment to spell out what got changed as a response to the
> patch.
> 
> I find myself fixing the title the most often, which is part of the
> "log message" you pointed out that would not convey well with the
> "incremental diff" approach.

I mentioned a micro-format elsewhere in my message. And it certainly is nice to have something that can be applied in an automatic way. But in practice, most review comments, for the commit message _or_ the text, are given in human-readable terms. And as a human, I read and apply them in sequence.

That pushes work onto the submitter, but saves work from the reviewers, who can quickly say "something like this..." without having to worry about making a full change, formatting it as a diff, etc.

I do think that's the right time-tradeoff to be making, as we have more submitters than reviewers.

-Peff