* Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 11:04:39PM CET: > On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > >> And no, emailing of patches is not more often necessary than now, i.e., >> mostly for posting "OK to apply" mails. That can even be done more >> easily, since there is a "git format-patch" command which will create >> formatted message(s) for this purpose. > > So if a patch is pulled from 'master', then I assume that the derived > patch which will be applied to the branch will always be posted to this > list?
Erm, that could be done, but really those are two separate issues. > As far as cramping Gary's style goes, Gary (only used as an example > here) is prone to making large changes, and these changes may soon > render 'master' useless as a good source of patches for stable branches. Ah, no, this problem is easily avoided. git cherry-pick allows you to pick individual patches from one branch into another. Also, I didn't mean to say "every change that happens on branch-1-5 must also happen on newer branches". I do think this is a very good policy and as such should be the rule, but obviously it cannot be carried out if the branches are too different. Also, when merging or cherry-picking, things like ChangeLog entries typically need some help (there is a ChangeLog merge driver written by Bruno in gnulib). > A goal of a new versioning system should be to uninhibit creative people > while somehow keeping everything manageable in order to make periodic > releases. I'm pretty sure git will be a step forward toward this goal. > Perhaps libtool will become much more stable into the future? Libtool has > a long history of substantially morphing as new major releases are > developed. Maybe libtool is to the point where only portability and > maintenance fixes will be required, or perhaps we will enter more rounds > of substantial development. Well, I for one certainly welcome improvements which turn out not to be intrusive. When good advantage may be taken from more intrusive ones, we may just have to look. I think one good lesson learned is that we should require much more test coverage for all kinds of changes. Cheers, and thanks for your comments! Ralf
