Triggers should be merged
Triggers should be merged
Posted Mar 18, 2008 21:11 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)In reply to: Triggers should be merged by dskoll
Parent article: Who maintains dpkg?
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.dpkg.ge... Specifically Guillem Jover, main maintainer of dpkg, writes there (partial quotes): ... The branch has never been in an acceptable state, it needs cleanup, which Ian has refused to do, repeatedly, and wasted probably more time and everyone's energy starting this (and previous) massive flamefests than what would have taken to just fix it. ... Anyway, after the freeze was announced it was clear that Ian was not going to fix the branch, and because having this feature for lenny is highly desirable I was just going to have to fix it myself and review during that process, but got quite sick for a week, during which he started all this mess. ...
Posted Mar 18, 2008 21:29 UTC (Tue)
by mgb (guest, #3226)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Mar 18, 2008 22:01 UTC (Tue)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
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Posted Mar 20, 2008 3:49 UTC (Thu)
by akumria (guest, #7773)
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Presumably you have some sort of evidence for this?
Having a clean history is a cost. No doubt. But having an unclean history is a higher cost.
Weeks. Months. Years down the track, isolating a problem to "a branch you merged" which has lots of unrelated changes can make debugging significantly harder.
There is plenty of evidence to show that debugging is assisted by having good forensic tools -- such as a clean history.
You mean someone developed a feature dependant on another feature rather than developing the secondary feature against mainline and making it easier to review?
Basically the thrust of your complaint seems to be that it is the reviewer who should do all the work rather than the submitter.
That can certainly work in some contexts (e.g. when the submitter is your boss and they pay you) but in a volunteer project you want to make things as easy as possible for a reviewer to give you the thumbs up.
Each barrier (no I don't have the time to do X, that feature (Y) is dependant on X -- which I won't seperate) makes a reviewers job much harder.
Posted Mar 20, 2008 6:02 UTC (Thu)
by jamesh (guest, #1159)
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Posted Mar 20, 2008 11:16 UTC (Thu)
by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
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Triggers should be merged
Those quotes are misleading without also stating why Guillem considers the feature branch to
be unacceptable. Guillem demands that Ian rebase in order to create a prettified history.
Rebasing is not only an inordinate waste of effort in this situation but will also make it
harder to merge other long-pending work.
"Triggers" is not some kind of experimental hack. This is a well-written and documented
feature which has been working successfully in Ubuntu for half a year.
It's unfortunate that Guillem was sick for a week, but he blocked the merge for six unsick
months before that. And as soon as Guillem was once again unsick he started work on more
indenting and renaming of unused parameters.
Debian urgently needs to regain control of this critical package so that experienced
developers can get it back on track.
Triggers should be merged
Read the full message (I quoted only partially) to see why that particular feature branch was
considered unacceptable.
Triggers should be merged
Rebasing is not only an inordinate waste of effort in this situation
but will also make it harder to merge other long-pending work.
Triggers should be merged
Rebasing certainly does have a cost. The act of rebasing effectively states that the old line
of development is now dead, and the rebased version is what everyone should be using.
This is not much of a problem if the old line of development was private or no one else ever
merged that work or based new branches off that tip. But if others have used the old line of
development, they are now obliged to rebase their work too. In contrast, if you just merge
the branch you get the history as it was developed and all the dependent branches can continue
on as before.
I'm not sure where Ian's branch fits in on this spectrum, but I wouldn't be surprised if the
Ubuntu distro folks have work based on top of Ian's, given that triggers are in that version
of dpkg.
Triggers should be merged
I wonder whether anyone has based their work on Ian Jackson's triggers branch, other than...
Ian Jackson, in his later work.