Re: [PATCH v3] Documentation: specify base point when generating MyFirstContribution patchset

From: Glen Choo <chooglen@google.com>
Date: Oct 18, 2021, 17:32 UTC
Message-ID: <kl6lzgr6z1a1.fsf@chooglen-macbookpro.roam.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqzgr6w97p.fsf@gitster.g>

The fact that we are having this right/wrong base discussion makes me think that including the base is out of scope for first time contributors.

Show 5 quoted lines

> But that does not mean master would always be the right base, does
> it?  What if you had a work totally unrelated to the contents of
> this tutorial on the 'master' front?  The person on the receiving
> end may not even know what object it refers to until you pushed your
> 'master' branch out.

This is the crux of the problem, which is that the contributor's base is actually their private 'master' branch, but their patches go to the upstream 'master' branch. Does it even matter that the patches were originally authored on a private 'master'?

If it matters, the 'master' should be part of the patchset or it can be described using the conventions of the list ("this series is based off a merge of ab/foo-bar and cd/baz").

If it does not matter, then providing the base is not helpful.

I suspect that we are documenting --base is that we do not have *any* documentation of this in our mailing list workflow docs, and MyFirstContribution is becoming a catch-all for all of our workflow regardless of whether it is truly for first-timers or not. My own docs changes [1] are arguably guilty of doing the same thing.

As you mentioned in the v2 thread:

  Actually it is up to contributors whether they want to include `--base` 
  or not.

This is a level of discretion that we shouldn't be leaving to first timers (as a very recent first timer, I would not appreciate this ambiguity). This document should be recommending good, easy-to-follow defaults for first timers, thus I think that discretionary things belong elsewhere.

We might consider adding _yet another_ document designed for levelling up contributors past their first contribution, something along the lines of "Patch submission tips and tricks". This could hold information that we want contributors to know about, but are not necessary for a first-timer e.g. --range-diff and --base.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20210922202218.7986-1-chooglen@google.com/