[Toybox] [PATCHES] cleanup passes on cut.

[Daniel K. Levy]

On Mon, 2017-02-20 at 22:06 -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> I've been sitting on my local changes here for months (haven't found
> time to finish testing and writing up the rationale for the changes)
> and it's not fair to you, so I'm deleting my changes (patch attached
> for posterity, doubt I'll ever look at it again) and applying yours
> instead.

After looking at your rewrite, I like most of it a lot better than
mine. And it's not that hard to guess at the rationale. After all, code
is *also* a medium for communication with people (in addition to
telling machines what to do).

I'm guessing there's quite a bit of good work sitting in your local
changes that just needs time for *someone* to look at.

I've got an idea. What if you committed your in-progress changes into a
separate, "wip" or "in-progress" git branch? Warts and all, maybe with
TODO comments for what needs to be fixed/continued/whatever.

That way, contributors can see what's up and continue the progress.
Once something is in a mergeable state, it can be merged into master.
Or maybe generate a clean patch set on master, apply it, and then merge
the changes back into the wip branch. Some experimentation needed to
figure out the right workflow?

Or, perhaps submit the changes as a pull request on github. This has
the advantage of not putting the broken stuff in the tree, and it
allows comments and change suggestions to be made outside of the code.
On the other hand, it's harder to work on without an internet
connection.

Maybe the simplest option is to have a toys/wip dir which is one
logical step below pending. It could contain duplicates of existing
toys, which might be completely broken while they're in progress, but
get promoted to pending or regular dirs once completed. I'd just worry
that someone might try to actually use the wip toys if they were in the
master branch, especially if they were new.

Just, something to allow contributors to prevent duplicating or
invalidating your work.

Anyway, something to think about if you have a few moments of spare
time.

HTH,

Daniel Levy