[Gimp-developer] Proposal for bug-/patch-related Git branches

["Michael Schumacher" <schumaml gmx de>]

Hi,

we've got a lot of patches attached to various bug in Bugzilla, many of then unreviewed (currently: 77) and, 
for the most part, untried.
There's also a large number of patches in the needs-work state (currently: 61), meaning that someone has 
reviewed them and determined that there are changes to be done.

There are some efforts to get them applied, but this doesn't seem to be an ongoing. It isn't obvious who 
might be working on applying a patch, and patch contributors do not get much visible feedback.

I think we're not using the power of Git to its full potential here. 

We can easily have someone apply a patch to a local bug-specific branch, check if it looks basically correct, 
maybe try if it compiles (this can be difficult if it is intended for a different platform), and then push 
this branch to origin to make it available for testing by others, changes, fixes, ...

The goal for those branches would be to be merged/cherry-picked into the branches master, gimp-2-8, ... as 
applicable and desired, and the temporary bug branch could be deleted after all of its changes have become 
part of these branches.

I've done this locally for several of the attachments we currently got in Bugzilla, and pushed one of these 
branches, bug-357818, to enable someone to build and test it. Bug 357818 is about a change to the TWAIN 
plug-in, and I don't build on, for or run the platform it is intended for. The build test enabled us to spot 
and remove some erroneous characters that have been added when I had to adjust the patches to the current 
state of the plug-in.

Possible advantages can include nightly builds of those branches, if we think that some bug fix should get 
much user exposure before it is added to a release.


I vote for encouraging to have public branches that correspond to bugs/patches, and name them in an obvious 
way. I'm not booked to the bug-<number> naming scheme, but found it useful for this purpose.


Comments, opinions, suggestions? (but please try to keep the bikeshedding down)


-- 
Regards,
Michael
GPG: 96A8 B38A 728A 577D 724D 60E5 F855 53EC B36D 4CDD