[darcs-devel] darcs patch: (mostly TeXnical) changes to the documentation

Tommy Pettersson ptp at lysator.liu.se
Fri Sep 16 14:38:26 PDT 2005


On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 05:48:13PM +0200, Andres Loeh wrote:
> The patch attached contains all the changes I've made so far.
> I do not expect this to be applied immediately, it's meant as
> a basis for discussion. I can try to make different patches 
> out of it and resubmit in parts, if that's desired.

I haven't looked at the patch and haven't thought about the
questions, but I will (later...), because I think it is a
very good initiative.  This last question, however, I can
dwell on right away.

Yes, it would be very good if you broke the patch down into
several smaller patches, splitting on modules as well as
type of change.  One benefit is that it becomes possible to
describe exactly what the patch does by the sole patch name.
Another is that the archive maintainer can accept all approved
patches right away.  A third is lessened risk of dependency
problems; for example, if some formating change touches both
feature A and feature B, and feature A later gets a bug fixed,
then it is not possible to pull feature A (with the bugfix)
without also pulling feature B, since (well, rather 'if')
the bugfix for A depends on the formating change that depends
on feature B.  The last benefit must be weighted against the
benefit of grouping coherent changes in a single patch and
the likelihood that feature A and B are useful in separate.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>




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