On Sun, April 4, 2010 at 3:33 pm, Gé Weijers <g...@weijers.org> wrote: > > On Sun, 4 Apr 2010, D. Richard Hipp wrote: > >> I argue that abandoned branches are part of the historical record and >> ought to be preserved. Fossil does distinguish between "Open" and >> "Closed" branches. The user interface currently displays all branches >> on the same page, but if it got to be a problem, the UI could be >> enhanced to show only the Open branches. > > I personally prefer to remove my false starts and mistakes, and commit an > idealized version of my code development history for other people to > review. It's hard enough to perform meaningful code reviews without having > to parse people's late-night mistakes. I tend to agree with the Parnas & > Clements paper that it's often better to "fake it" [*]. Novelists don't > publish their intermediate versions either, BTW, they've been 'faking it' > since the invention of creative writing.
I think there are two answers to this. Firstly, Fossil is distributed, so my idea of how to play about till I get something useful is to create a new repository clone that never pushes its content back to its parent, play (including checkins) until done, then merge the current trunk into the play repository, clean up as required, write a checkout of the play repository over the top of a checkout of the "official" repository (taking care to preserve the _FOSSIL_), then build, test, fix, and checkin. Result - a perfect jewel in a single checkin :-) Secondly, keep a clean branch in the same manner as Richard's "clean title" branch in Fossil's own repository. It would then reflect the "official history", and the only branches off it would be fixes that had to be applied to an earlier release. > >> http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/shunning.wiki > > It's questionable whether you still have a usable repository after you > attempt to remove a random artifact that's been involved in merges etc. > > This is not a criticism of Fossil, by the way, it's always a problem, but > it's a little easier to solve on a centralized system. > > Happy Easter, > > Gé > It's possible there should be two levels of "shun", the lesser of which does not actually cause artifacts to be deleted. As for the case of removing "illegal" insertions, I think it is far better to have the real history saying "we had these from this date to that date, as you can see, but you can also see that they were removed at a particular time and not used thereafter". This follows the accounting principle that incorrect entries have to be reversed out, not made invisible. Without this it is not possible to demonstrate how some situation arose from an action taken while the repository was incorrect. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
