[Rpm-maint] What's the best way to submit patches?

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 09:47 -0500, James Bowes wrote:
> As I was re-applying my changes against the actual hg.rpm.org, I got to 
> thinking: what's the best way to propose or receive feedback to a change 
> with mercurial?
> 
>  From what I can see, there is:
> 
> * hg export, to make a plaintext patch

Generally speaking, this is the best method, especially for making it
easy to review.  mq can also make it nice to deal with a series of
patches so that each can be a relatively straight forward change.

> * hg bundle, to make a binary(?) changeset file

bundles can be okay for applying, less good for reviewing/getting
feedback

> * publishing your hg branch somewhere on the Internet

For huge changes, this can work, but it tends to end up meaning that
people looking at it go back to the first.  Having a branch with a
specific set of changes _can_ be nice, though, when it's multiple
patches and they get reviewed and agreed on as a pull can just be done
into the repo then instead of having to mess with patches by hand

> What do people prefer? I'm starting to doubt pointing someone at an 
> entire branch, as it might end up being something like "check out 
> changes x through y in my branch for feature z", though I guess using 
> more branches would help with that.

More branches is definitely "best practice" with a distributed SCM.  It
definitely takes more thought sometimes, though, after being used to CVS
for way too long.

My $0.02 anyway

Jeremy