[Developers] Re: patch: CactusEinstein/IDAxiBrillBH cleanup

[Erik Schnetter]

On Friday 20 May 2005 14:31, Tom Goodale wrote:
> It all looks good, please go ahead, although as you note at the
> bottom it would be good if you could split the commits into smaller
> units, each addressing an individual thing, e.g.
>
>       relabeling latex
>       adding comments to param.ccl
>       adding the interpolator parameters
>       adding new output (I agree that it should really be a GF so we
> can use standard Cactus IO methods)
>       add debugging stuff
>       adding new stuff to the documentation
>       etc
>
> In general, small, specific patches will get quicker attention, and
> thus lower latency, than big patches which do lots of different
> things.  If you'd sent a note out to developers that you were doing
> this, and followed with a sequence of patches as you did things, it
> would have been easier.

This is not how development works.  The original problem is that the 
physics output is wrong, and then one usually doesn't start to send 
patches until the physics output is right.  At which time many 
different things have accumulated.

Taking things apart takes a lot of time, and is in my opinion not worth 
the effort.  It would be worth the effort only if one wants to go back 
in time.  But since the thorn contained an error, this is quite 
unlikely.  Additionally, many small patches depend on each other, and 
that leads to other problems.

Also, Jonathan probably didn't send out a note to developers because his 
intention was to get correct physics.  Had thorn IDAxiBrillBH turned 
out to be unfeasible for the job, then he would have dropped his 
changed and used / written a different thorn.  "Grabbing" a thorn 
exclusively is against our workflow.

We have an old version and a new version of the thorn.  You can take the 
two versions and create a patch from the difference.  Artificially 
creating new versions in between is a waste of effort.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at aei.mpg.de>   http://www.aei.mpg.de/~eschnett/

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