Subject: bug#9031: Installed rest of patch

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:51:04 -0400

>> it's better to keep code cleanups for later
> This particular fix is both a code cleanup and a bug fix.

Yes, it was OK.  I just felt that Juanma's answer was a bit too much
on the "we're not yet in pretest" side, so I wanted to compensate by
reminding people that we should think of fixing bugs now, not cleaning
things up.

>> you could try to install them in the `pending' branch, but such code
>> cleanups are likely to generate merge conflicts
> Does this advice mean that code cleanups should not be installed
> anywhere now, not even in the 'pending' branch?

You can install them there, but that branch is really meant to be
a repository of patches that will get merged to trunk in some distant
future.  Code that touches a lot of code is likely to encounter merge
conflicts when we get to that distant future.  And changes which need to
apply to "all places where foo happens" are even more likely to be
out-of-date when we get to that distant future.

> I ask because I have some integer-overflow-and-signedness-related
> cleanups and bug-fixes in my private copy that should really get
> incorporated at some point.

Put them somewhere.  But I suspect that it'll be easier to re-do them
than to merge the current patch several months from now, so it's
probably important to store somewhere the "how did I come up with this
patch" along with the patch.

> (Sorry, I don't know the current practice with regards to the
> 'pending' branch; maybe 'pending' should be documented somewhere
> under admin/?)

It's "documented" in http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/README.
We don't really want to encourage people to use it too much, since the
focus should instead move to fixing bugs.  But sometimes it's easier to
install the patch somewhere than to try to mark some bug report as "it's
got a patch and the patch is good to go, we just have to wait for the
trunk to open up again before we can install it".

        Stefan