Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ben Franksen <[email protected]> · Fri, 14 May 2010 19:54:10 +0200

On Freitag, 14. Mai 2010, Jeff Hill wrote:
> I was writing code quickly and using the SCC system to transfer back and
> forth from my home to my workplace. For that type of development when the
> commit is occurring only to transfer the code between my house and my
> workplace the minutia comments are less beneficial (it can be hard to
> come up with insightful comments when you are tired, and leaving late).
> Note that this was work on new features and not patches. We definitely
> need the SCC comments for tracking patches. I do see that doing such
> developments on branches works better. I anticipate that the merge is
> going to take some extra work however.

I am astonished. Does Bazaar not have an equivalent of 'darcs unrecord'?

Because I am using this kind of workflow all the time with darcs and never 
had the slightest problem with it. If I have to quit my work in a hurry (no 
time to record a clean patch with a decent description), I do some 'darcs 
record -am"DUMMY"' anyway (and push if I am at home); next time I see the 
DUMMY patch I unrecord it, clean up, and re-record.

Or is it rather that you are using the central shared repository for 
synchronizing home/office work? This is probably not such a good idea. I'd 
advise to push and pull (or whatever the equivalent operations are named in 
Bazaar) from your home machine to some private repo (clone) on your office 
workstation. Being able to do so is one of the main reasons why distributed 
VCSes have been invented in the first place.

As I think about this, maybe it would be worthwhile to consider a different 
approach for EPICS base: send patches via email instead of directly pushing 
to the main shared repo. This is certainly less convenient, but would 
enable others to review the changes before they get committed to the main 
repo. The Darcs development team has a nice agreement: nobody pushes their 
own changes! In this way they have a guarantee that at least one other 
person has reviewed the change. Core-talk would be the natural place where 
to send patches. For Darcs there is a patch tracker tool that is useful for 
keeping track of which patches have been committed and which are still in 
the pipeline or have been withdrawn or rejected. I am confident that there 
is something similar for Bazaar.

Note, I do NOT propose you follow this approach, merely consider it.

Cheers
ben
-- 
"One must never confuse what is natural with what is habitual."
                                                       Mahatma Gandhi

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System