[note: CC'ed to the mailing list] (for the benefit of the list members CC'ed, the code Leslie wrote for the Google Summer of Code programme was managed via git at http://repo.or.cz/w/findutils.git, but the "upstream" repository for findutils code is still the CVS tree described at http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=findutils).
Leslie, Eyeballing the current list of findutils bugs at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils, I see that a large fraction of the remaining bugs are now fixed or greatly helped by the changes you already made for the Google Summer of Code. I fixed most of the other bugs, but left those that overlapped with your SOC work. I'd like to get us into a position where we can fix those bugs by merging your code into the main findutils code base. During the Google Summer of Code I tried to keep the SOC git branch failrly close to 4.3.x in order to reduce the eventual merge burden. I haven't done such a merge in quite a while now. Per our previous discussion though, I currently plan to release 4.4.0 and make a new development branch before merging your changes into the trunk. The thinking behind this is that your changes are quite large and there are many changes in 4.3.x that are now stable, so it makes sense to roll that existing work into a new stable branch. All this may be old news, but the 4.3.x tree has also moved on since the conclusion of the Google Summer of Code. I started to merge the 4.3.x changes to date into the "polzer" branch at http://repo.or.cz/w/findutils.git, but the merge work was significant. Instead of doing the merge the usual way, I merged your "polzer" branch and the "master" (that is, currently 4.3.x) branch into "polzer2". The thinking here is that I didn't want to introduce bugs into your "polzer" branch just by making a mistake with a manual merge. If you have the time, I would like for you to check that work. I've already done the bulk of it, I just need you to essentially review the merge. If you are amenable to doing this, there are two obvious alternatives: 1. Merge "polzer2" into "polzer", carefully. By "carefully" I mean taking into account the rather high probabilty that I made a mistake. 2. Redo the merge yourself and then compare against what I did in the polzer2 branch. This is perhaps more time consuming but will likely avoid the mistake I made, which was to forget to "pull" origin:polzer into my local copy of your branch before merging from master (i.e. the 4.3.x trunk). This actually doesn't need to be done right now, because a stable 4.4.0 release is not exactly imminent. Since this is a reasonably large amount of work however, I thought I'd mention it now, since no doubt you have other time commitments too. Just to give you an idea of the work still left, there are about 55K lines of diffs between the current 4.3.x code and your current "polzer" branch, but only about 3K lines of diffs between the "polzer2" code (i.e. the result of my merge attempt) and the current 4.3.x trunk. Hence my claim that I've already done the bulk of the work, but hence also my concern that a mistake may have been made somewhere in there. Of course, thanks again for all the work you did already. Sorry to ask you to do this too, but since your're the original author of those changes you are going to be the best judge of whether they have actually been correctly merged or not, I think. Thanks, James.
