Abstract of my presentation ¶

In our group, we base a lot of our work on few Python packages. The development of these packages involves people with very different levels of experience in coding and in versioning. Depending on the software project, the development is hosted on different platforms: https://foss.heptapod.net/, an university Gitlab instance and Github. For the projects hosted on Heptapod , we use a workflow based on Merge Requests (MR), topics and the evolve extension. This workflow presents great advantages for us:

• the code review associated with each MR is very efficient to improve the skills and productivity of the students.

• Topics and evolve allow the experienced developers to directly interact on the MR and on their history (in particular with rebase, amend, fold, absorb, …). The readability of the history of the repositories is largely improved.

• Fairly quickly, students master at least amend, lose the apprehension of making bad commits and tend to commit small changesets and to push more often. With hg-git, Mercurial can also be used for projects hosted on Gitlab and Github so students do not need to directly interact with Git.