The cost of contributing

[Aaron Bentley]

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James Westby wrote:
> On (28/06/07 16:55), Aaron Bentley wrote:
>> Now create a message in your mail client and attach the merge-directive
>> to it.
> 
> This is an extra step that --mail-to allowed me to avoid. That saving
> made it seem like less effort to submit a patch, and prompted me to try
> and fix some bugs.

The main thrust of my argument is that BB's implementation makes this a
bad idea.  I'd agree that BB *should* support it.  It just doesn't yet.
 And since I wrote both, the discrepancy is amusing.

The next thing I plan to do with BB is implement vote-by-mail, since
Robert won't use the web for voting.  Supporting message-body merge
directives would come sometime after that.  But Bundle Buggy is open
source, and patches are gratefully accepted.

> With the workflow you propose I have to do the work, and make the
> commit, then create the bundle, which takes a noticeable amount of time.

I have been working on fixing that.  With the new merge directive and
bundle formats, I can generate your "Re: [MERGE] Bug #122656: better
error message for bzr ann 'doesn't exist'" request in 1.687 seconds,
rather than 5.175.

> Yes, that is true. I try and write good commit messages, but sometimes
> that wont be appropriate either.
> 
> If we were to have a command that made all of this easy, perhaps it
> could fire up an editor for you to write the body of the message, much
> like commit does.

I think just an editor isn't good enough.  I think we want to invoke the
user's mail client.  Unfortunately, there's not a lot of
standardization.  I know the Thunderbird invocation is something like

mozilla-thunderbird -compose attachment=file://NEWS

I have no idea about mutt.

> Creating a 'send' like command that knew where to send
> the changes, the preferred format, and gave you a one shot way of
> submitting might be something to consider.

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree.  I've been encouraging people to write a
slick "send" command.

Aaron
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