Re: [PATCH] config: Use parseopt.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 14, 2009, 21:10 UTC
Message-ID: <7vtz6wrahg.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <94a0d4530902141209j7a3a9976l80355bee526852ed@mail.gmail.com>

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

>> Unfortunately, not many patch authors write such a summary.  Sometimes we
>> see summaries on things that were discussed but nobody has followed
>> through posted by third parties (including myself), but we do not seem to
>> have enough helpers to do that either.  This does not take much technical
>> skills but is a good "trust point" earner.
>
> For me it's easier, and more fun to write a separate patch that fixes
> the issues than writing a summary,...

That certainly is something we should take into consideration.

I however think an unwritten assumption around here so far has been that the patch author who gets review comments is expected to keep track of the issues raised, both about the patch itself and about the similar breakages in the existing code pointed out during the review process, if only because the patch author is the focal point of the discussion.

We probably need to break that.

Because it is very likely that the reviewer does not even realize that such similar breakages in the existing code when a review is made, we cannot ask reviewers to always start a separate discussion. Some reviews do say "Admittedly, we already have the same pattern in here and there, but this in your patch is wrong," but the way how we collectively realize an existing breakage is often by hearing the patch author respond with "but there already are this and that breakages in the existing code."

We do not want such knowledge of existing breakages go to waste in either case. Perhaps it would be a good start to make it the responsibility of the first person who mentions an existing breakage (either the reviewer's "Admittedly", or the patch author's "but there already are") to begin a separate thread, so that mail archive would remember it. It shouldn't take more than 3 minutes.