Commits on head vs. branching

[Eric S. Raymond]

Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo.de>:
> Gary E. Miller writes:
> > As I said yesterday, I gave up on the top dopwn approach.  I have
> > gone to bottom up.  Fixing small things.  It will prolly take me a week
> > to deal with all the really obvious -Wsign-conversion warnings.
> >
> > I am trying to make all my commits very bytesize, so each is
> > trivial to vet.  Feel free to keep an eye on me.  :-)
> 
> What became of the idea of you doing that in a branch?  It would really
> help to fix the constant stream of typos and "whoops" before they hit
> the master branch.

Achim, the house practice here is to develop with small commits on master
rather than branches unless the change is very large and very intrusive.

Yes, this means we have some bobbles and missteps in our trunk that
could have been avoided with a branch-merge approach (and some of
those missteps are mine).  That's a tradeoff I cheerfully accept in
order to have everyone's attention constantly focused on the state of
the actual working code. I also think this practice encourages small
commits and staying humble.

That said, your criticism of this particular patch sequence is quite valid
and I will address it in a separate reply.
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