[Feature-dev] Subversion practices

[Mike Wong]

Hi all,

A question came up about checking in bad code. A few of you may have already noticed that I check in bad code and note in the comments "this is bad code" or words to that effect. I may have created the bug, or maybe I'm propagating a bug already in the repository; it doesn't matter. The bug needs to be communally addressed and fixed (eventually).

In my experience, making small changes and committing frequently is
much better than making large changes and committing occasionally.
Generally a developer makes good changes, but one small mistake hidden
among many changes is a real challenge to find. Conversely, checking in small changes with errors makes it easy to isolate and identify the bugs and is essentially a cry for help. If you come across non-working code that prevents you from checking in your modifications, contact the person who committed the changes and offer to help. When we meet next, I'll talk about techniques that can be used to sniff out bugs quickly and effectively using Subversion, and a few tools that I've developed specifically for FEATURE that automate these techniques.

In short, check in your code frequently*. Try to make sure it works first, but don't sweat too much if it doesn't. We're here to help each other!

See the FEATURE developer wiki page (http://wiki.simtk.org/feature/RevisionQuality) for more information on our revision quality.

Best regards,

- m.


* Frequently means that if you do an 'svn diff -r HEAD' you should get less than 6 pages of text; 3 pages or less is ideal.
 __________________________________
Mike Wong, Staff Research Associate
Center for Computing for Life Sciences (CCLS)
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue, Hensill Hall 301, SF, CA 94132
(415) 405-2119
mikewong at sfsu.edu
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