Collaborator Access

[henrydingliu]

@kennethshsu i recall at one point in time that you preferred we work on branches in the upstream/casact. outside the 4 code owners, no one else appears to be able to create or edit branches on the casact repo. all the PRs you see from others are from their fork. is this what you had envisioned? want to make sure we are on the same page.

[kennethshsu]

Hmm no, I think I prefer that routine collaborators join the CAS community and be able to create their own branch inside casact. For those that are just submitting a one off PR can stay on their own fork.

Being on the same repo actually makes reviewing easier because you can switch to that branch to do what is needed. I couldn't figure out a way to review a PR off a fork without doing a bit of extra work to bring everything back to the same repo.

What do you think?

[genedan]

I anticipated it was a convenience thing - I came prepared with a response! There's a way to check out a fork's branch via my IDE (the red circle has a dropdown to check out), I think if you're using VS code you should have something similar:

I used to think I had to clone and then check out if I wanted to do a deep dive, which was annoying. But there's an IDE feature that lets me stay in my window. Hope that helps.

Reason I brought this up is because I do want to keep the official branches tidy and manageable. If we let non-codeowners create branches on origin, we'd have to prune frequently and deal with abandoned branches. It might even be that the codeowners shouldn't be creating non-protected branches on origin. When I checked pandas, the big maintainers merge from their personal forks.

[kennethshsu]

That's cool, let me look into this in my IDE.

On a separate now, there are actually a lot of old branches that probably could be deleted. And I agree that we don't just let anyone in to create new branches on origin, I do think we want to include consistent contributors to be included in the same circle?

Pandas is much bigger, and the only branches I see on origin are by release versions. I don't think we are that mature to do that yet? I do enjoy being able to create a new branch on origin.

[henrydingliu]

Being on the same repo actually makes reviewing easier because you can switch to that branch to do what is needed. I couldn't figure out a way to review a PR off a fork without doing a bit of extra work to bring everything back to the same repo.

The only time that it's created extra work is when there are conflicts between the pr branch from the fork and main. but the PR raiser should be taking care of those anyway.