Documenting minimizing diffs for ease of review

Open
#1,018 12 comments 5 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Read the documentation style guide linked in the issue and review the existing discussion about minimizing diffs. Add guidance only if the project agrees on the preference, with examples showing the recommended wrapping style; the style guide should clearly document the convention when done.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

needs: decision type-feature

Suppose we have some lines that are close to 80 chars long

first text ... end first text.
second text ... end second text.
third text ... end third text.

and if the first line needs some sort of modification that would push it past 80 chars, we can either restructure the entire paragraph of raw rst so it looks tidier, but resulting in 4 lines of git diffs

first text plus some more ...
end first text. second text ...
end second text. third text ...
end third text.

or diffs can be minimized (but with an 'uglier' raw rst), such as like

first text plus some more ...
... end first text.
second text ... end second text.
third text ... end third text.

I think that for ease of reviewing, as well as to maintain a more useful git history, that the second is preferred in general but I haven't found it in the style guide, so maybe it can be added there if there's consensus on it?

Dominant language
Python
Stars
2.1k
Forks
1k
Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
12

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from python/devguide

All issues in python/devguide

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.