Michael DeHaan wrote:
Anyway, github has some very nice graphing features, one of which
shows something they call "impact". Who is making changes to
cobbler over time.
Neat. The git homepage does something less fancy, but similar. It
lists the authors, using the output of git shortlog (which it does in
a round-about way, that I sent a patch to simplify :).
I've mentioned before if someone wishes to keep their patches on
github (or another git tree that is web accessible), that easily
allows me to preserve attribution.
What's wrong with using git am (short for apply mailbox)? The patches
generated by git format-patch can be used directly as input to git am
and will preserve attribution¹ Folks can even use git send-email or
git imap-send to get the patches sent if their email client doesn't
make it easy to use the format-patch output as a message.
I'm genuinely curious, as maybe the git am workflow isn't suitable for
everyone. I know in puppet, it doesn't seem to be used either. But
git and the kernel operate largely using this workflow. In some
cases, the problem is that people use crappy email clients that make
it harder to import and/or extract a the patch from the messages they
send. (My answer to that is to use a better client. ;)
It's not really a big deal (for me anyway, most patches I send are
incredibly trivial). It's more of an anal-retentive data-junkie pet
peeve. But I do think it's nice to have an accurate log of authors,
as it allows cool things like the github graphs and other tools to
show how wide (or narrow) a community is. And, it gets the maintainer
off the hook for any crap patches you import as yourself.
Hopefully as the tools improve and more folks use distributed
versioning systems, preserving authorship and blame will become more
commonplace and easier for everyone.
And, a big thanks to you Michael for all the work you've put into
developing and maintaining Cobbler, as well as all the other folks
here! It's a very cool tool to have available.
¹ Perhaps also worth mentioning is that git commit has an --author
option that can be used to preserve attribution as well as the
GIT_AUTH_NAME and GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL (and corresponding
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME and GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL too). These are all less
convenient options than git am -- as long as you can get folks to send
patches properly. :)
--
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL:
www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
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