[Gnu-arch-users] Re: named patches and "Does Linus matter?"

[Davide Libenzi]

[I'll skip anwering to Stephen since the two are related]


On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Tom Lord wrote:

>     > From: Davide Libenzi <address@hidden>
>
>     > Named patches and virtual patches enable you to work on the same
>     > branch with multiple independent logical patches, w/out
>     > switching continuosly branches. Virtual patches enable you to
>     > create a virtual group of patches dynamically, on the same
>     > branch that hosts other virtual patches.
>
> I suggest that we look a little bit at how the functionality of these
> features is already there, today, at the cost of a little bit of "by
> hand" bookkeeping -- and then, possibly, at how to further automate
> that.  At least one person has been working on that for a while now.

Oh absolutely. If you have a GUI that shows you the summary and does the
summary->patch-ordinal association for you, that'll help. The reason I
proposed named patches was because names are better indexable than
numbers and easy to refer to w/out GUI tools. It also did not seem
incredibly painless to implement (looking at namespace.c), but if you say
different I must have missed something. The other reason for name patched
(fully qualified named patches) is that if we are able to preserve their
names across merges, algorithms for multiple cross merging will become
easier. See example that you report on the manual, and look at the graph I
posted in my first email. Virtual patches were a way to logically
associate multiple change sets, and were also useful in case of cross
merging that maintained fully qualified patch names. But I don't want to
lose more your and mine time here. You eventually think that those are not
useful, and this is fine for me. Many times ideas stick around and gets
eventually implemented later, you just never know. You can refer to the
shell-script <-> C-source saga for example. Arch works decently for me
currently and it is ages ahead of CVS, and this is enough for me now.



> Sure.  But such appeals to an "issue of the day" aren't going to
> impress or intimidate us.

Where did I exactly intimidate someone ?




- Davide