[cfe-dev] Questions about Workflow & Submitting Patches

[Manuel Klimek via cfe-dev]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 4:14 AM Shyan Akmal <sakmal at g.hmc.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm working with a team of students that's interested in contributing to
> the clang front end (with the initial step of writing new checks for
> clang-tidy).
>
> We'd like to setup a workflow that makes it easy for us to review each
> other's work before officially submitting changes upstream, and also will
> be amenable to officially integrating our changes to clang-tidy.
>

My advice would be to not do that, but to do all reviews publicly in
phabricator. Otherwise the reviewer that accepts the patch will potentially
go into all the same questions again that were discussed earlier, and the
later you get architectural feedback, the more expensive to change it, so
the chance to get insight from folks as early as possible is a huge benefit.

Generally, I'd want to teach students that one of the most important rules
of software development is that change is cheaper the earlier it is made,
so discovering what needs to change as early as possible is probably the
single most important skill one can develop early in one's career :)


> Our current plan is to fork the git mirror of LLVM, and make commits to
> this copy of the repo on GitHub. After we finish writing and reviewing a
> check, we'd get the diff and submit a patch through Phabricator.
>
> This seems inline with the process suggested in the LLVM docs (from
> https://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#for-developers-to-work-with-git-svn
> and https://llvm.org/docs/Phabricator.html).
>
> *Questions*:
>
>    - Does this workflow make sense, and is it in accordance with LLVM
>    developer policy?
>    - Is there an alternate (or more standard) workflow that anyone thinks
>    would work better?
>    - If we work through a git repo, is it necessary to use git-svn to
>    make sure svn (and not just git) has changes saved?
>    - Are there any specific practices we should adopt to make sure our
>    additions can be successfully integrated into the current version of LLVM?
>
> Best,
> Shyan
>
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