On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com> wrote:
>
> At a macro level, that cycle was repeated many times, leading to the
> opposite end result:  a lot of tiny movement/refactor/movement/refactor
> producing the review and patch annoyances described.
>
> It produces a blizzard of new files and new data structures, breaking a
> bunch of out-of-tree patches, complicating review quite a bit.  If the vast
> majority of code movement is up front, followed by algebraic
> simplifications, followed by data structure work, further patches are easy
> to review/apply with less impact on unrelated code.
>
> The flow of patches into the tree over time should be examined.  Simply
> tagging patches as movement-only does not address the described problem at
> all.
>

I think we can all agree that if the process is made more friendly for
reviewers, everyone wins. It's been hard to even know where everything is
because it moves so often. e.g. In the last couple weeks stuff moved from
core.h to core/block.h to primitive/block.h or something to that effect.
Anyway, Jeff said this quite elegantly.