If you want to increase the number of patches you need to make sure that the process is as unobstructive as possible. You need to prepare an expert that will do the following. ...
I don't know what to think of this...
I have understood you taazz are an experienced programmer, yet now you suggest that an "expert" application taking care of some trivial revision control tasks would "increase the number of patches". Actually you ask to replicate the functionality of an SVN client + some other SW which is dummy.
This reminds me of the "expert" people who used to whine on this forum some years ago about how poorly organized the Lazarus development is and how inferior tools are used ... etc.
Nobody never saw a single line of source code from those whiners. Nothing good came from them, they only wasted everybody's time and energy.
One popular topic was Git against SVN. According to the "experts" the usage of Git would bring a substantial amount of new developers to Lazarus project. Well, using Git in a distributed manner has been supported for some 3 years now but still _nobody_ has used this opportunity.
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Creating_A_Patch#Using_a_forked_Git_repository_directly"Substantial amount of new developers" my ass!
The fact is that our development tool chain works exceptionally well.
There is FPC and Lazarus. They both are now mature and robust tools.
Then there is the robust SVN server. Many advanced clients can be used with it. Even Git can be used through "git-svn link". I actually use it for my development and it is very good.
There is the excellent Mantis bug tracker. It supports advanced filtering of issues. In fact it is near perfect, better than Bugzilla IMO. Finding the old patches is maybe the only usability problem I can think of.
There is the debugger, GDB. Despite of some imperfections it covers all my debugging needs.
There are still more tools and all of them are good. They have never prevented me from fixing or implementing something in Lazarus code. The only limiting factor has always been my own brain capacity.
For example I have used 10 or 12 hours sometimes to fix a single bug, learning code, experimenting, throwing away the experiments, experimenting more, testing, tweaking and so on.
Finally the change may be only a few lines of code. I can commit it in few seconds. Then I close the bug report with a message "Fixed, please test". It takes another few seconds.
Now when somebody explains that better tools for the development process would "increase the number of patches", it feels so stupid. Such person clearly has no glue about what it means to change code in a 2,000,000 LOC project.
taazz, can you please explain?