[Xmonad] darcs patch: move Spiral to LayoutHelpers. (and 4 more)

[Dave Harrison]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> droundy:
>> On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 11:03:58PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
>>> droundy:
>>>> A resend for dons.  Conflicts with two recently accepted patches, but I
>>>> don't see that as my fault.  If you accept patches that implement wrong
>>>> fixes for code written my myself that I've properly fixed, then you can
>>>> deal with the conflicts.
>>> Thanks David. You can avoid this situatoin by dropping by #xmonad on irc
>>> to discuss changes, before sending off mountains of code. Its very hard
>>> to review things that haven't been discussed beforehand, which means
>>> delays and hold ups, as we sort though the new code. As I say, we like
>>> to be cautious.
>> The trouble is that I have very little time for xmonad stuff.  And I
>> generally find that code itself is the best way of expressing an idea as to
>> how to do something.
>>
>> My main objection is not that it took you a while to review the code, but
>> that you applied changes to modules in XMonadContrib for which I am
>> nominally the maintainer without even giving me a chance to comment on said
>> changes, and this after I'd already sent in a fix for the very same
>> issues.  It makes sense to apply bugfixes quickly, but not when there's a
>> fix for the very same code by its maintainer waiting for review.
> 
> Yes, I agree that's the problem. Code is coming in from 2 or 3 people
> simultaneously touching the same file, so if a large patch is waiting,
> the easy patches get applied first -- that was the mistake here.
> 
> In future, we'll have to resolve in favour of the large/maintainer
> patches first, before proceeding with smaller patches that can conflict
> with the large ones.
> 
> And I think it might also be a good idea to claim stronger ownership for
> contrib modules, so David becomes the go-to guy, if you want to touch,
> say, Tabbed.hs.

This is probably the next step for using the distributed model in a
more public way, but here's what I've seen other projects do when
using git, hg etc:

Key, or core devs publish their own outgoing trees alongside your own
at some location (an example of what I mean is evident here :
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/DeveloperRepos

This means that people like David (Roundy, not me ;-) ) can publish
their own tree containing the stuff they are responsible for, and also
directly manage the patches for their own code.  Then the release team
(yourself and Spencer ?) can pull from their published repo whenever
you want to, merge it all together into a single release repo, and cut
a tag for it.

Not sure if this works with darcs since I've never used it
(personally, I'm a git ;-) ).  But it would solve the problem of
people being able to publicly maintain their own code, without you
having to worry about the current patch management problem you have -
you just have to trust the maintainers.

Cheers
D