Should be an easy way of adding a diff when submitting a merge proposal

[Björn Tillenius]

This bug is a bit hand-wavy. I just wanted to capture the fact that we want diffs to be automatically added to merge proposals when they are added.

Currently we tell people to add the diff as a comment, and they often forget to do this. I think it's quite important for our process that we get this working somehow automatically. Whether the diff is generated automatically (which can be a bit hard with branches that depend on other branches), or we make bzr review-submit/send add the diff somehow doesn't matter. As long as there only one thing the user has to do in order to both add the merge proposal and add the diff.

[Paul Hummer (rockstar)]

I don't feel that this is really a High priority. Eventually, Launchpad will be generating its own diffs. Putting effort into allowing manual diffs seems like wasted effort. AIUI, the database patch will land this cycle, so that the code that requires it will start landing on edge soon.

See bug #245257

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 05:27:55PM -0000, Paul Hummer wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 245257 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/245257
>
> I don't feel that this is really a High priority. Eventually, Launchpad
> will be generating its own diffs. Putting effort into allowing manual
> diffs seems like wasted effort. AIUI, the database patch will land this
> cycle, so that the code that requires it will start landing on edge
> soon.

When you say eventually, what time frame are you talking about? I filed
this bug because, IMHO, it's a step towards having Launchpad generating
the diffs automatically. You need some (code-internal) way of attaching
the generated diffs, and you of course need some kind of UI to display
the diffs.

If you do those two changes first, and expose a method for attaching a
diff via the API (which should be really simply to do), people can start
take advantage of this, while you're working on generating the diffs
automatically. I think a "release early, release often" mentality would
be good here, instead of blocking everything on having the diffs being
generated automatically.

To re-iterate, the effort for "allowing manual diffs" is simply to
export the method for attaching a diff, which you will be needing
anyway.