Re: [GIT PULL v2] git-gui pull request

On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 1:45 PM Pratyush Yadav [off-list ref] wrote:

In light of the recent breakages on macOS, this PR contains a revert of
the offending commit. I will add it back in the next version with
problems on macOS fixed.

This highlights the need for me to figure out a way to test on macOS. It
is not a good strategy to put breaking bugs in a release and hope to fix
it in the next one. And macOS has been a regular offender. Dunno if it
is possible without owning the Mac hardware though...

A couple suggestions:

Send pull requests to Junio early and often. His tree gets tested more
widely than the stand-alone git-gui, so breakage is more likely to get
detected earlier rather than later in his tree, thus giving us a more
comfortable margin for dealing with problems.

The majority of the problems noticed on macOS have not been specific
to macOS itself. Rather, they are specific to the old version of Tcl
which ships with macOS. Therefore, an easy way for you to detect these
problems early is to install an old version of Tcl on your development
machine and ensure that you test against that version before sending a
pull request. I think that this approach alone would catch all of the
outright breakage problems we've seen recently on macOS. (It won't
catch aesthetic issues, but those tend to be minor compared with the
outright breakage.)

Thanks.