Mercurial mail flood

[Matthias Klose]

Andrew John Hughes schrieb:
> 2008/5/30 Mark Reinhold <mr at sun.com>:
>> Personally I view the inclusion of patches in Mercurial notifications as
>> a distraction unless they're very short, but I know that opinions differ
>> on this.
>>
>> - Mark
>>
> 
> Well, for me, it depends on whether the patches have been published on
> a list prior to the commit.
> With Classpath, we've never had patches in the mails; the commit
> message and links to the diffs
> on CVS appears.  The patches are posted separately to a separate list.
>  In contrast, I've found some
> of the icedtea commits useful to read, because that's the only place
> I've seen the change.  But these
> seem to be truncated if they go over a certain length and generated
> files in the repository isn't helping
> this.  So I'd tend to agree that very short easily digestable ones are
> fine in the commits (see Lillian's recent minor
> IcedTea changes for the release) but that larger patches should be
> attached in a separate mail and (dare I say it) on a
> separate list.

Could we establish a policy not to redirect the commit messages to the ML, but
instead require a manual posting of a patch (excluding generated files),
together with a short rationale why the patch is applied and what it is supposed
to fix? Should make it easier to track the history of patches. This information
might be in some bug tracker, but probably not in the IcedTea tracker. Having
this information in one place on the ML would be helpful.

  Matthias