stopping patches from just floating by

stopping patches from just floating by

[jidanni]

I have many Documentation/* grammar patches that I can send next week.

However I fear they will be for naught, just floating by.

OK, one should keep track of the patches one sends, making sure they
are resolved one way or the other, and don't just float by.

Reviewing SubmittingPatches, in the future I will use [PATCH/RFC]
instead of just [PATCH].

I notice lots of "Merge branch qq/bla". And think, hmmm, Mr. QQ must
be using Documentation/everyday.txt's [[Individual Developer
(Participant)]] git-push methods, for a more efficient way of getting
his patches included by the maintainer.

But then I step back and look at all the [PATCH]s on this list and
conclude that just as SubmittingPatches doesn't mention git-push, the
whole git development world must be by simple emailed patches, and I
needn't bother learning git-push, making depositories on my web server
etc.

Re: stopping patches from just floating by

[Daniel Barkalow]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

> I notice lots of "Merge branch qq/bla". And think, hmmm, Mr. QQ must
> be using Documentation/everyday.txt's [[Individual Developer
> (Participant)]] git-push methods, for a more efficient way of getting
> his patches included by the maintainer.

Nope, that would lead to "Merge git://qq.org/git bla". In fact, Junio is 
getting the patches by email, and then using that workflow in his own tree 
to manage the maintence process. That is, he creates a branch for each 
patch series that someone sends that looks ready for more exposure, by 
starting with some plausible commit and applying the series of patches, 
and then he can merge than branch into pu, next, master, or maint as 
needed. This is particularly useful for pu, where he redoes all the merges 
frequently; if he worked by just applying the patches, every time he 
wanted to drop a series that he'd applied before some other series, he'd 
have to pick out the conflict resolutions from the original author's 
changes.

	-Daniel
*This .sig left intentionally blank*

Re: stopping patches from just floating by

[jidanni]

I see. Say, for my forthcoming 40 minor grammar fixes that affect 20
files in Documentation/*, I just couldn't bear spamming this list with
more that one or two [PATCH] mails. OK one long mail it will be then,
with several commits encompassing many diffs. Hope that will be OK.
(Then another long mail next month, when I finish looking at the second
half of the man pages.)

Re: stopping patches from just floating by

[Junio C Hamano]

jidanni@jidanni.org writes:

> I see. Say, for my forthcoming 40 minor grammar fixes that affect 20
> files in Documentation/*, I just couldn't bear spamming this list with
> more that one or two [PATCH] mails. OK one long mail it will be then,
> with several commits encompassing many diffs. Hope that will be OK.

It probably won't be Ok, as earlier documentation patches from you that
were smaller had good bits that were applied and not so good bits that
were dropped, and I'd refuse to pick and choose only good bits from one
single large patch myself.  The tradeoff between "minor grammar fixes" and
my time spent to do so is not good enough.

Please send in small isolated pieces so that people do not have to comment
"in this patch, this and that rewordings are very good clarification, but
this other hunk adds noise without adding much signal".

And by "isolated", I do not mean "one mail per patched file".

For example, if you fix many misused 3rd person singular verbs that ends
with 's' that are used for subject that is not 3rd person singular, that
is one topic and one patch can fix an error of that kind in all of 20
files.

On the other hand, if you conflate such a fix with a new explanation of an
option (which may or may not be adding more noise than the signal) to the
same file in a single e-mailed patch, you will force people to say "this
part is good but that part is not".  That's not the isolation I am
referring to.

grammar patches not best use of talent

[jidanni]

I've decided to back out of my plan to patch grammar.
$ perl -nwle '/\w+\s+handful.*/i&& print $&' Documentation/*|sort -uf
a handful commits on top of that,
A handful documentation fixes.
A handful documentation updates.
a handful example hooks are copied in the
a handful fixes to run it
a handful of examples:
A handful of sample hooks are installed when
a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better
a handful small fixes to gitweb.
a handful the real changes in non-zero
first handful of characters, show the full
only handful hexdigits prefix.
only handful hexdigits prefix.  Non default number of
only handful hexdigits prefix.  This is

At first some of the above lines irritated me, but who am I to say
that English must be said like my mom says it, and is never allowed to
evolve further. Nope, I'll stick to correcting 2+2=3 type things.

Re: grammar patches not best use of talent

[jdelstrother]

Wait, "a handful X" is now a legitimate form of "a handful of X"?  I
assumed they were due to non-native speakers.

On 1/12/09, jidanni@jidanni.org <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
> I've decided to back out of my plan to patch grammar.
> $ perl -nwle '/\w+\s+handful.*/i&& print $&' Documentation/*|sort -uf
> a handful commits on top of that,
> A handful documentation fixes.
> A handful documentation updates.
> a handful example hooks are copied in the
> a handful fixes to run it
> a handful of examples:
> A handful of sample hooks are installed when
> a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better
> a handful small fixes to gitweb.
> a handful the real changes in non-zero
> first handful of characters, show the full
> only handful hexdigits prefix.
> only handful hexdigits prefix.  Non default number of
> only handful hexdigits prefix.  This is
>
> At first some of the above lines irritated me, but who am I to say
> that English must be said like my mom says it, and is never allowed to
> evolve further. Nope, I'll stick to correcting 2+2=3 type things.
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Re: grammar patches not best use of talent

[Junio C Hamano]

jdelstrother@gmail.com writes:

> Wait, "a handful X" is now a legitimate form of "a handful of X"?  I
> assumed they were due to non-native speakers.

You assumed correctly.

Jidanni is saying that _he_ thought about doing so, and then changed his
mind.  I personally do not know what the point of saying such things on
the public list like this: you either just do it, or you don't, and you do
not add noise to the traffic by saying you won't do this nor that.

If you agree with me on the above point, just ignore the message you are
responding to (I am not saying "just ignore _him_"; at least not yet), and
if you are inclined to help, please don't let the message you are
responding to discourage you.

Thanks.