better tools make it easier to play nice [LWN.net]

better tools make it easier to play nice

Posted May 19, 2005 19:38 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589)
In reply to: Where Apple is not playing nice by jmayer
Parent article: Open-source divorce for Apple's Safari? (ZDNet)

If this is true that Apple provided the changes, but not in a way that was useful to the other
KHTML devs, then maybe things would have been different if they had been using a nice revision
control tool such as darcs.

This is assuming that Apple provided the changes in large-grained format because it would have
taken too much work to provide it in fine-grained format.

If you haven't worked on a big branch like that then you might not understand just
how much work it can take to isolate your changes into coherent units. In many cases it can take
longer to generate reasonable diffs than it took to write the changes in the first place.

If everyone involved had been using darcs, it might have been different. Maybe next
time.

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