Re: patch vs. overwrite in bzr

[David Engster]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
>> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
>> The problem is similar to cherry-picking, but reversed: you want to be
>> able to get all changes except for a few negative-cherrypicks.  E.g,
>> "pull/merge from the Org branch all changes except for those few ones we
>> don't want" (and inversely, they want to "pull from the Emacs branch,
>> except for the file-renamings they did to adapt to their directory
>> layout").
>
> Would the problem be solved if such cherry-picking weren't needed?
> That is, if the branches were exactly identical, but kept in two
> different VCSes?  If this would solve the problem, then that's what
> I'd suggest doing.  After all, all those differences sound very minor;
> e.g., why not rename the files as the other guy does?

At least for CEDET, I can surely tell that we won't get fully identical
branches, at least not in the foreseeable future. This is mainly due to

- compatibility code we keep for older Emacs versions (we will drop
  Emacs22 support for our new development branch, but there are still
  things like cedet-called-interactively-p for Emacs 23.1),

- features that currently depend on defadvice or other hacks, but that
  are very useful for hacking on CEDET (generating properly linked help
  buffers for EIEIO methods and classes, for instance),

- minor packages which are not needed or wanted in Emacs proper (like
  COGRE),

- things we don't have papers for and are in our contrib directory,

- EIEIO is part of CEDET but not in lisp/cedet but in lisp/emacs-lisp (a
  similar problem exists with Speedbar, but that is in Emacs for quite
  some time now and most development happens there anyway).

It's not as bad as it sounds; most of the differences are minor or are
at least well separated, but still - you need to cherry-pick commits.

-David