Re: git bikeshedding (Re: triggers in dpkg, and dpkg maintenance)

[Otavio Salvador <otavio@debian.org>]

Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 09:16:59AM -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
>> Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>> > What I am trying to achieve is to use git in the proper way: that is,
>> > in a way which makes merging work properly.
>> >
>> > Insisting that I use git in a manner which makes merges break but
>> > gives prettier logfiles is absurd.
>> 
>> That's why you should avoid using the branch as basis to others until
>> it's clean and also avoid to make it public (without a reason) too.
>
> This makes it more difficult to ask for review while the branch is in
> progress, which is a valuable property. It is ridiculous to artificially
> avoid making branches public; a branch is a useful means of
> collaboration and we should take advantage of it as such.

I'm not saying that it couldn't be made public for review however I
suppose noone will ask for review if it's still at start of
development process.

It's rather easy to someone contrib to others branch and it could be
done as soon as it looks more mature. In that case, rebase would stop
to be done until the feature is finished. After that, a new run to
cleanup the history would be done.

>> Usually, I make branches public when my log looks sane.
>> 
>> And it's not absurd, is to allow everyone to be kept sane when looking
>> the log in 5 years forward.
>
> I have never once run into this problem with other revision control
> systems in which branching and merging are common. Somehow it just never
> seems to be a real issue. I contend that dpkg is not big enough for it
> to become a real issue.

The problem here is that it's not a requirement to use git, however
it's the dpkg repository policy and I guess we all (even more ones
outside of the team) need to respect it.

I personally apply this same policy on repositories that I work and it
usually makes much easier logs to read.

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