Re: dpkg semi-hijack - an announcement (also, triggers)
Hi,
I'd like to clarify few more things, which have been brough up the past
few days. Even if I don't usually accept open invitations to flamefests
(re the OP).
On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 14:42:48 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 10:38:44PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > On 09-Mar-08, 19:30 (CDT), Daniel Stone <daniel@fooishbar.org> wrote:
> > > I was going to ask on which grounds exactly you were judging the dpkg
> > > team's competence (and that of iwj's: have you reviewed the branch
> > > yourself? can you confidently say that it's all fine?),
> > The problem is not the dpkg team has reviewed the patch and had problems
> > with it, it's that they've ignored it for 6 months.
>
> That's not the full picture.
This was a nice summary.
> > I don't approve of IanJ's hijack attempt, but in this he's got a
> > legitimate complaint.
>
> Against the wishes of, afaict, Guillem and Raphael, Ian's made applying
> his triggers patch dependent on:
>
> - reversion to two space indenting
- reversion of unrelated commits
> - a policy of bulk conversion of intentation style, instead of
> the current policy of gradual conversion from two-space to
> four-space
>
> - having explicit casts to (char*) of NULL in order to support
> some non-Debian architectures
- having the commits not split into logical parts
- having unrelated features/changes in the same branch
> - having the git log not be bisectable or particularly meaningful
> except historically
> - having Ian be part of the dpkg team
The missing changelog entries are actually minor compared to the rest
of the problems with the branch.
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.
About rebasing (-i), we've asked for the branch to be rebased as part
of the needed cleanup (or any other method which would have resulted in
a clean branch or series of patches). He could have kept his existing
branch if he so desired, but I don't really see much point in that given
that the resulting cleaned up branch would not resemble the original one
anyway. One of his excuses was that he had based other feature branches
on this one, which is another bad idea, as this was tying unrelated
changes together.
Also I don't think we'd have insisted on rebasing (even if I personally
would prefer so) if the branch would not have been a mess, FWIW, we've
merged clean branches before in the team. And I don't really understand
this aversion to rebasing a branch that should be pulled from at some
point (I'm obviously not talking about the official branches here),
most people would find sending messed up patches unacceptable, but not
this?
> If he hadn't done that, afaict the patch would've been handled pretty
> much the way Tollef's was.
I've to say, overall, interactions with Ian have been mostly
unpleasant, demotivating and confrontational. Not really my definition
of "fun".
> I don't believe anyone on the dpkg team at any point gave Ian a definite
> answer on any of the above issues over the past months; though I doubt
> he would have accepted a "no" on any of them anyway.
Maybe we've not sent a strong enough message, but there was repeated
long conversations, AFAIR, on mail and IRC about how we'd like to see
such a branch or series of patches being submitted.
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.
I'm back on the clean/split/merge process, and should finish soonish
if I don't get distracted by more useless flamefests... Also given that
he does not have commit access any longer I'll be taking care of
integrating any reasonable change that might be on any of his branches,
in the same way we'll be getting eventually at all the remaining patches
that are waiting on the BTS.
And I'm also quite disappointed with the amount of people that have
jumped to conclusions without knowing the context of all this.
regards,
guillem
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