Re: [Caml-list] Project hosting for new OCaml projects

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

Le mercredi, 5 mars 2014 à 21:10, Christophe Troestler a écrit :
> On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 21:00:40 +0100, Daniel Bünzli wrote:
> >  
> > [...] the pull request mechanism is broken (e.g. it completely
> > muddies history with useless commits) [...]
>  
> P.S. You can always merge using the command line¹ which does not have
> that problem.
>  
> ¹ The URL is provided in the mail Github send you so you do not even
> have to go to the Github site.

Yes, that's what I do. But that's not the only thing that is broken about pull requests.  

I think the mechanism (each pull request is a branch on which you push commits) makes it too easy to get non-logical, incoherent commits. There's a pull request, you ask for corrections. The contributor instead of correcting, amending its commit and force pushing to the branch just adds commits to the branch, which results in a sequence of commits that may not make much sense on your main branch (even worse it may put your project in an intermediate bad state on certain checkouts which is bad for git bisecting). Of course you can always ask people to do the right thing, but I think the actual contribution process should make you do the right thing.  

An example here (not to be mean to this fine individual trying to contribute to the opam repository):

    https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/pull/1756

The second commit will make no sense in the history of the opam-repository.  

Best,

Daniel