[GNC-dev] Small changes to comment text, mostly in gnucash/import-export/import-main-matcher.h

[John Ralls]

Geert,

Reviewing and commenting a big patch with several commits touching several files and keeping track of what's been changed between versions via an email conversation isn't attractive to me, nor is trying to keep track of which change-sets have been applied, rejected, or are waiting for revisions.

Yeah, the linux kernel uses mailing lists and a huge posse of designated maintainers for handling patches. There doesn't seem to be any documented system for keeping track of the patches, just an exhortation to submitters to rebase and resubmit frequently during the limited "merge windows" at the beginning of each development cycle. It sure seems to me--and likely to most everyone else in the FLOSS community--that learning to use GitHub or GitLab as a prerequisite for patch submission is the less painful route.

Regards,
John Ralls



> On Dec 5, 2021, at 1:07 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> I actually wonder whether we should reconsider our strategy.
> 
> We're pretty used to the convenience of github pull requests. But patches by mail are 
> actually the main method offered by git itself. So forcing potential contributors to go 
> manipulate a website in order to get a patch sent is is counterproductive to people 
> accustomed to the git mail process.
> 
> I agree this mailing list may not be the proper destination for such mails but nothing stops 
> us from also setting up a mailing list specifically to accept patches. It can't be gnucash-
> patches as we already use that for other purposes. But we can come up with another one.
> 
> Note that also for us maintainers applying patches received by mail is not cumbersome at 
> all. Git has commands built in for that. The cumbersome part may come from getting the 
> mail out of your mail client into a directory structure where it can be read by git. If your mail 
> client is maildir based, that very mail directory is already in the right format to start with. 
> Otherwise it may require some save action on behalf of the maintainer. That's not more 
> difficult than what we currently do with bugzilla patches (which I'd rather drop in favour of 
> mail based patches as the latter has git integration and the former hasn't).
> 
> I'm interested what others think of this.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Geert
> 
> Op zondag 5 december 2021 15:34:45 CET schreef Derek Atkins:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> On Sun, December 5, 2021 8:55 am, D. via gnucash-devel wrote:
>>> Kevin,
>>> 
>>> The preferred way to submit changes is through git PRs, not with patch
>>> files attached to emails to the lists. You'll get better results using
>>> that method.
>> 
>> I would add that there are two preferred methods:
>> 
>> 1) Github PR
>> 2) Patch attached to a bugzilla report.
>> 
>> Patches sent in email are likely to get lost or forgotten.  Sending them
>> via bugzilla and github are less prone to loss.
>> 
>> Also, for the record, the patch did NOT make it through the mailing list's
>> "purge HTML" process and into my inbox -- so it is already lost!
>> 
>>> David T.
>> 
>> -derek
> 
> 
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