Re: [PATCH] documentation: add tutorial for revision walking

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 19, 2019, 15:17 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq4l4lr4dy.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20190617235053.GD100487@google.com>

Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Maybe there's a case for storing them as a set of patch files that are
> revision-controlled somewhere within Documentation/? There was some
> discussion on the IRC a few weeks ago about trying to organize these
> tutorials into their own directory to form a sort of "Git Contribution
> 101" course, maybe it makes sense to store there?
>
>   Documentation/contributing/myfirstcontrib/MyFirstContrib.txt
>   Documentation/contributing/myfirstcontrib/sample/*.patch
>   Documentation/contributing/myfirstrevwalk/MyFirstRevWalk.txt
>   Documentation/contributing/myfirstrevwalk/sample/*.patch
>
> I don't love the idea of maintaining text patches with the expectation
> that they should cleanly apply always,...

Well, I actually think the above organization does match the intent of the "My first contribution codelab" perfectly. When the codebase, the workflow used by the project, and/or the coding or documentation guideline gets updated, the text that documents how to contribute to the project as well as the sample patches must be updated to match the updated reality.

I agree with you that maintaining the *.patch files to always cleanly apply is less than ideal. A topic to update the sample patches and tutorial text may be competing with another topic that updates the very API the tutorials are teaching, and the sample patches may not apply cleanly when two topics are merged together, even if the "update sample patches and tutorial text" topic does update them to match the API at the tip of the topic branch itself. One thing we _could_ do is to pin the target version of the codebase for the sake of tutorial. IOW, the sample/*.patch may not apply cleanly to the version of the tree these patches were taken from, but would always apply cleanly to the most recent released version before the last update to the tutorial, or something like that.

Also having to review the patch to sample/*.patch files will be unpleasant.