Mike Frysinger posted on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:44:52 -0400 as excerpted: > On Friday, June 17, 2011 11:31:43 Duncan wrote: >> It's worth pointing out that if Mike and others' workflow already >> involves a lot of this, they'd be modifying it very little if they >> simply avoided separate removals. In fact, in borderline cases where a >> trivial change may not have made it on its own, as it waited for a >> bigger change to come along to be worth doing, the removals combined >> with the trivial change may now trigger the trivial change commit >> earlier than it would have occurred otherwise. > > if you look at my commit behavior, this is exactly the sort of thing i > avoid. > my cvs commits are pretty logically clean to the point where importing > into git would result in nice behavior. which means i make one commit > to remove, one commit to fix a specific bug, one commit to version bump, > etc...
Good point and exactly the behavior best on git as it makes for far easier and more effective git bisects when necessary. Unfortunately (for oh so many reasons!!), Gentoo's main tree and workflow isn't "git-ified" yet. But I can certainly commend someone whose personal standards demand that same one-thing-and-one-thing-only commit separation, modern dVCS or not. Meanwhile, case-in-point of why changelogging removals matters. My last post was to a kde list, helping someone trying to build kdelibs on RHEL. He was missing the libdbusmenu-qt dependency, which I was able to point out, and I went on to describe the version info. Gentoo's kdelibs-4.6.4 dependency for that library is >= libdbusmenu-qt-0.3.2, but I have 0.8.2 installed. Because the information was in the changelog, I was able to tell him that my current 0.8.2 was introduced in April, the other available version on gentoo, 0.6.2, was introduced in Sept. 2010, there was a version jump (at least on gentoo) between 0.3.5 (from June, 2010) and 0.6.2, and the 0.3.2 that's gentoo's minimum requirement was introduced on Gentoo in April 2010 and removed in Sept, 2010. So even 0.3.2 isn't much more than a year old (on RHEL 5 it's likely an upgrade!), but was already considered old enough to remove ~6 months later. That information on 0.3.2 removal wouldn't have been available to me (at least not without making a huge project of it, checking Gentoo's viewCVS logs on the web) had someone not put it in the changelog. Users DO find that information useful and there have been quite a number of times I personally have found it useful in helping people not necessarily on gentoo (tho I believe I've spotted hugely outdated based on changelogs versions of packages on gentoo-users systems, too), but in other parts of the FLOSS community. Having that information not available locally on my system, either by changelog as now, or by git whatchanged, if users finally get access to direct git-pull once the main tree is git-upgraded, would be a serious regression. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
