patching

I have a standard format for patchnames: 1234-99.project.brief-description.patch, where 1234 is the issue number and 99 is the (expected) comment number. However, it involves two copy-pastes: one for the issue number, taken from my browser, and one for the project name, taken from my command line prompt.

There's been a lot of discussion about how we need github-like features on d.org. Will we get them? There's definitely many improvements in the pipeline to the way our issue queues work. Whether we actually need to replicate github is another debate (and my take on it is that I don't think we do).

My workflow for making patches is to use a feature branch for a single issue. Whether you're a contributor or a maintainer it lets you advance the fixing of the problem in small increments, and safely experiment knowing you can roll back.

But where it goes wrong is when your patch is superseded by a newer one in the issue queue, and you want to work on it some more. How do you update your branch for the ongoing work? As ever, with git there's a way.