Commit History vs User Convenience

[Michael Dickens]

In my opinion: A single rev-bump is required when changes to the overall Portfile require it -- whether a single commit or multiple commits in a PR. The overall goal of a rev-bump is to force the port to be updated; it is a developer necessity & it's value is really not for the user's convenience.

I'd say so long as you note specifically in the commit message that a rev-bump -should- be done here but you're holding off for a future commit within the same PR, then that meets all of the basic requirements: it provides history & rationale, and still does the required rev-bump.

To be fair: One could, of course, clone the MP GIT repo & check out the interim commit (without the rev-bump) ... but, I don't see why anyone would want to do this & if they are sophisticated enough to do this then they can figure out the rev-bump issue too.

My US$0.02 worth ... - MLD

On Mon, Oct 8, 2018, at 10:13 AM, Marcus Calhoun-Lopez wrote:
> I was hoping to get some help with how best to balance commit history 
> and user convenience.
> 
> I would like to make two unrelated changed to the GCC ports.
> Each change requires a revision increase of all the GCC ports.
> 
> There seem to be a few options:
> 1) Create two separate pull requests and have them merged separately.
> 2) Create one pull request that increases the revision number only once 
> for the two unrelated changes. 
> 3) Create one pull request with several commits. Each commit increases 
> the revision number (for a total of two).
> 
> Personally, I believe option 3 is the best choice.
> The history remains clean, and nobody has to rebuild GCC twice in a 
> matter of a few days.
> I have created such a pull request 
> (https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/2730).
> 
> However, the comments in the PR seem to indicate that option 2 or 3 is 
> preferable.
> 
> I was hoping to see if others had any strong feelings about this.
> Ultimately, it makes little difference to me, but we have had concerns 
> in the past about frequent rebuilds of large ports such as GCC.
> 
> Thanks,
> Marcus