Merging [LWN.net]

Merging

Posted May 15, 2008 12:07 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: Merging by rvfh
Parent article: Distributed bug tracking

If you can't distribute the work over more than one person, what's the point in a 
distributed system in the first place? Only the copy of the triager counts. The other 
copies are unreliable.

to post comments

Merging

Posted May 15, 2008 15:04 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (2 responses)

Only the 'metadata' is centralised, and again, the triager can delegate (which a centralised
server usually doesn't do ;) so you still have a better system.

IMHO, only the comments/patches really need to live with the code.

Merging

Posted May 15, 2008 21:46 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

So what is it better than today? A centralized place for meta-data: the bug tracking system.

We have the metadata centralized. There are many places where you have hacks to refer beterrn
the source and the bugs database (e.g: specially-formatted commit messages close bugs,
trac-style formatting of commit messages)

Merging

Posted May 16, 2008 7:34 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

I got your point, but do you get mine?

What was being discussed was the merging of metadata such as priority and all the other stuff,
which could be problematic on a decentralised system (comments/patches are the easy part), and
I was suggesting to _not_ automatise and risk making mistakes (e.g. priority inversion), but
rather let someone (human being) decide and solve the conflict: the triager.

A server does not delegate, a triager can, so this is a marginal and dynamic centralisation,
rather than a full and static one, like e.g. Bugzilla.