[scribus-dev] patches are ready...

Craig Bradney cbradney at zip.com.au
Tue Oct 2 18:29:53 UTC 2012


On 10/2/12 6:59 PM, a.l.e wrote:
> hi greg,
>> I guess I would tend to line up with Craig about being conservative about
>> incorporating patches. It's one thing if a patch works, but one wants to
>> know if it risks or actually does break something else, and there has to
>> be a desire to keep some consistency in the way things are implemented in
>> the code.
>
> i've never meant to say that every patch must be accepted with no consideration of its quality.
>
> but the contributor deserves a fast answer: accepted or refused.
> and if refused, what has to be improved (if it can be improved...)

I'd agree where I'd qualify "fast" as "when we can review it". Small patches take a couple of
minutes. Massive patches like Cezary's footnotes patch could take weeks (where week=week of natural
life rather than dedicated time). Time I give to Scribus these days might be as little as a couple
of hours a week.

Patches should *only* change one area at a time, not, eg, adding footnotes and indic support or
something like that.

Also, it is unrealistic, given the above definition of week and paid vs interest-based work on
Scribus, that a large patch will be reviewed line for line. There is therefore the expectation that
a submitted-for-commit patch would be ready to go in terms of functional testing being complete.

Therefore, a contributor should do work in a git branch and ask people to review it there for bugs
and functionality gaps. Once complete, then a bug should be submitted with reviewers agreeing it has
been tested and should go into SVN. Those who want to work but don't want to use git should pass a
working patch to reviewers directly for testing.

People who want code style or code review at any point in the process earlier than patch submission
can happily send a patch via email or via a bug, assuming the qualification is made that its for
code review rather than for committing,

Craig



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