Checkin Comments for IronPython Source

We’ve been slowly but surely increasing the frequency of IronPython source drops. When I joined the team last April, we we only pushing the source about twice a month (sometimes only once a month). By last July, we were pushing source about once a week. Since mid-January, we’ve pushed out the latest source 131 times, which comes to about once a day on average since the start of the year. Big kudos to Dave Fugate, who’s primarily responsible for improving the frequency of our source code drops.

However, while we’ve been good about source code drop frequency, we haven’t been good about transparency. All those source drops have the same less-than-useful checkin comment “Latest IP sources migrated to CodePlex TFS”. If you wanted to know what was changed in a given changeset, you had to do the diff yourself.

But all that opaque code changes is a thing of the past now. Dave upgraded out source push script so that it emails a list of changes as well as the checkin comments whenever we update the source on CodePlex. For example, check out the source push announcement for our latest source drop.  Now we publish added, deleted and modified sources as well as the comments for any checkins included in the source drop.

As Dave said on the mailing list, please let us know if you have any feedback on these source update emails. I think they’re awesome (though I did have one small suggestion) but we want to know what you think.