Create a ghc-simple-patch-propose list? Re: Notes from Ben's "contribute to ghc" discussion

[Eric Seidel]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016, at 18:37, Ben Gamari wrote:
> Moritz Angermann <moritz at lichtzwerge.de> writes:
> 
> > All that arc essentially does is, compute the diff from an offset
> > (e.g. master) to the current HEAD and upload that to a new or existing
> > (--update) differential. It also adds some meta information about the
> > range, such that arc patch supposedly knows into which commit to apply
> > the patch to.
> >
> Sure, but this leads to generally unreviewable patches IMHO. In order to
> stay sane I generally split up my work into a set of standalone patches
> with git rebase and then create a Diff of each of these commits.
> Phabricator supports this by having a notion of dependencies between
> Diffs, but arcanist has no sensible scheme for taking a branch and
> conveniently producing a series of Diffs.

I completely understand how this would be frustrating for core
contributors (more specifically for people submitting large patches),
but for new or casual contributors it's actually quite freeing. I don't
have to worry about how messy my local history gets, because arc will
throw it all away regardless! It absolves me of an extra responsibility,
and lowers the barrier to contributing.

It would be nice to support both workflows though :)