[Toybox] Preferred submission format (was Re: new toy : w command)

[Tim Bird]

On 07/18/2012 02:09 PM, David Seikel wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:40:59 -0700 Tim Bird <tbird20d at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is better to provide the patch inline, in the message body, rather
>> than as an attachment.  This allows people to easily respond to
>> individual parts of the patch by commenting directly in a response
>> e-mail.  Comments can be placed in-line with the submitted code.
> 
> I thought it was generally agreed that attached patches are better
> than inlined ones.  Inline patches can get mangled to the point where
> the patch program fails to actually use them.  Attached patches are a
> separate item that wont get mangled.  Look back in this list you will
> see inline patches that had this problem.  Having the patch actually
> work is more important than the ability to comment on them in place.
> 
> In my experience with mailing lists where the patch is sent to the list
> by the source code management tool, people usually just quote the
> entire patch as one big blob when commenting on it.  Even if the patch
> is megabytes long, and their response is two or three words.
> 

Those are some good pros and cons for the different approaches.

I'm coming from a kernel development experience, where inline is
preferred.  I'll admit it is a bit of a pain to inline the patch
properly with modern mailers (there always seems to be some kind
of tab replacement, leading or trailing whitespace, or line wrapping
issue that someone's mailer does without their consent and which
mangles the patch.)  However, commenting on a single line of
an attached patch is pretty annoying.

I'm hoping the patches here are not megabytes long. That would seem to
defeat the purpose of the project.  :-)

This is Rob's project so I guess we should just go with whatever
his preference is.

Rob?
 -- Tim

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment
=============================




 1342647948.0