Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: --skip-present implemented

[Andrew Suffield]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 05:33:56AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> The "danger scenario" here is that you set out to do a pure merge into
> your main branch.   You do the merge and, let's say that the
> build/test reveals a minor unrelated bug or you notice some unrelated
> bug while fixing a merge conflict.   Without thinking about it, you
> fix that one-line bug, then commit (along with the merge itself).
> 
> Now your pure merge isn't pure because it contains changes other than
> the merge.  If using --skip-present causes the impure patch that
> includes that bug-fix to be skipped, the bug fix is dropped.

It's worth noting that the original motiviation for pure merges was a
system which automatically took changesets from one branch and applied
them to another. Within this part of the system, it's safe and
effective. Specifically, this is useful for one kind of patch queue
manager (although I'm not yet sure if --skip-present is necessary
there).

The possibility of reverting changes accidentally is real... but in
the right context, it's not a serious problem. I work on a few
projects which need extremely high reliability; the test suite is
highly developed and would easily trap most problems of that nature.

More generally, I *think* that a patch queue manager can trap this
problem. Not sure about that, though.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

pgpb4eUGhHv8J.pgp
Description: PGP signature