Improving Collaboration

There has been recent discussion on IRC amongst Mercurial developers about how we can better collaborate.

Current Concerns

Concerns about the current development workflow include:

• High-barrier of entry for new contributors (for example, the use of the patchbomb extension)
• Does not encourage the Mercurial development team to dogfood the tools we ship to our users
  • Example: named branch support improved after the development team started using (read: dogfooding) them
• The "Dictator for Life" hierarchy doesn't foster a feeling of teamwork amongst the rest of the developers
  • Not sure of the details about this one, but something along these lines was mentioned in the IRC channel
• Changes that are "queued" may not show up in the public repository until day(s) later

Possible Solutions / Improvements

Set Up an "Official" Mirror of Mercurial for Development on Bitbucket

• Figure out some way to make opening "pull requests" send a mail with the patch (and Bitbucket link) to the devel list for review (that way code can continue to be reviewed in a mailing list). Ideally we'd need to send comments back to the pull request so people looking at Bitbucket can see them
• Encourage the use of branches for work (rather than staging up patches in MQ) and be willing to merge them rather than to "force" a pristine history by only rebasing patches

Related discussions

http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2012-May/039771.html