[Koha-devel] Follow-up patches and why not to use them

[Julian Maurice]

Hi Joonas,

Do you know you can revert multiple commits at once (ie. only one 
"revert commit" that revert a series of commits) ? Would that make it 
easier for cases like that ?
And when trying to find all commits of a particular bug, git log --grep 
is your friend.

Also, you can show a list of commits as a single diff. I have a git 
alias defined to "diff origin/HEAD..." which shows all differences on my 
local branch from the remote default branch (master).

When you have a lot of patches, I agree that it is sometimes useful to 
see it as a single patch (that's why I have this git alias). But often 
it makes sense to have separate patches.

By enforcing a "1 commit" rule we would lose the (often) logical 
separation of patches that makes review easier.

That being said, there are other times where it would have made sense to 
just squash all commits together before pushing them to master. So I 
guess my opinion can be summarized at "it depends" :-)

Le 04/06/2021 à 12:36, Joonas Kylmälä a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> I just bumped in another case of follow-up patch style causing us
> trouble. In bug
> https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=28490 I had to
> spend considerable amount of time just reverting all the problematic
> patches and making sure I didn't miss any related patches, instead of
> just reverting one patch and knowing I would be good to go with that.
> Reverting this many patches also means a lot more review work yet again
> because you have no commit messages to reference to easily or if you
> want to use those you have to jump from patch to patch to find out what
> the change does. And this extra review work needs to be done by two
> people when reverting such follow-up patch series!
> 
> If we instead asked the original author to fix the patches then this
> work would need to be done only ~once. The argument against this I have
> heard is that it makes the review work harder because you don't know
> what has changed since the previous version. I think however that is not
> very useful because the second reviewer doesn't benefit from this at all
> and makes their work harder and also the first reviewer even sometimes
> might review the revision after many days by which time they have
> forgotten already the context so basically they end up in the same
> situation as the second reviewer and have to jump between patches.
> 
> Just my two cents, I hope we can stop doing follow-ups and instead have
> commits which contain one single change to decrease our time spent on
> review and make sure we don't miss any problems due to having to jump
> between so many contexts.
> 
> Joonas
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-- 
Julian Maurice
BibLibre