Re: Create a ghc-simple-patch-propose list? Re: Notes from Ben's "contribute to ghc" discussion

I have tried to gather the ideas from this thread into a formal proposal: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/11 Please feel free to make suggestions to improve this, especially if I've captured anyone's contributions incorrectly. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard A. Eisenberg Asst. Prof. of Computer Science Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr, PA, USA cs.brynmawr.edu/~rae

On Sep 29, 2016, at 10:20 AM, Christopher Allen wrote:

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Instead perhaps GitHub's new review system may be the way forward for GHC. It allows you to easily use git in the way it's meant to be used.

Many problems are caused by letting your inner tinkerer/genius tailor dictate how things should be dealt with. Better to cut the gordian knot. I think Michael's right.

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 5:05 AM, Michael Sloan wrote:

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On Wednesday, September 28, 2016, Eric Seidel wrote:

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On Wed, Sep 28, 2016, at 18:37, Ben Gamari wrote:

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Moritz Angermann writes:

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All that arc essentially does is, compute the diff from an offset (e.g. master) to the current HEAD and upload that to a new or existing (--update) differential. It also adds some meta information about the range, such that arc patch supposedly knows into which commit to apply the patch to.

Sure, but this leads to generally unreviewable patches IMHO. In order to stay sane I generally split up my work into a set of standalone patches with git rebase and then create a Diff of each of these commits. Phabricator supports this by having a notion of dependencies between Diffs, but arcanist has no sensible scheme for taking a branch and conveniently producing a series of Diffs.

I completely understand how this would be frustrating for core contributors (more specifically for people submitting large patches), but for new or casual contributors it's actually quite freeing. I don't have to worry about how messy my local history gets, because arc will throw it all away regardless! It absolves me of an extra responsibility, and lowers the barrier to contributing.

I dislike this workflow because I am already used to doing a lot of git rebasing / amending / auto squashing. So using arc means taking away my ability to write multi commit stories of how the change was crafted. For large changes there are often multiple logical inter related steps. Squashing them into one big commit makes it much harder to review. I can easily do that myself by marking everything as squash in a rebase. It feels like arcanist is just taking away power, not giving it (note i have not used it much - voice of a newbie here)

I am beginning to change my feelings on this, away from thinking of GitHub as an auxilliary source of didferentials. Instead perhaps GitHub's new review system may be the way forward for GHC. It allows you to easily use git in the way it's meant to be used.

-Michael

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It would be nice to support both workflows though :) _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

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-- Chris Allen Currently working on http://haskellbook.com _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs