Re: hurd-web/hurd/translator/unionmount.mdwn (was: News 2009-08-31)

[Sergiu Ivanov]

Hello,

On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 10:34:12PM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Am Montag, 7. September 2009 22:04:58 schrieb Sergiu Ivanov:
> > OK.  We only have to wait for another two weeks, I guess, until he
> > gets back :-)
> 
> Why don't you just do it? 
> 
> It's version controlled after all, so if something is a big problem for 
> someone, we can easily fix it. 

I can see your point, but please note that if I were to think of the
Hurd wiki in terms of a version controlled entity, I would create a
personal branch and wait for approval from the authorized person to
move the corresponding modification in the master branch.  However,
it's obvious that creating a personal (private) branch in the hurd-web
repository is rather meaningless since nobody can see it anyway.

OTOH, if I do just commit a change to the master branch right now and
should it be decided that this change was inappropriate later, there
would be two ways out: either remove the commit from the middle of the
history or do clean-up commits, both of which are rather ugly.

However, while writing this, it occurred to me that I could as well
put the short description into hurd-web/user/scolobb .  After all,
since the GSoC is officially past its end, I can mention the fact and
provide a short description of the result of the program.

What do you think?
 
> We don't lose anything when those who have most knowledge about the special 
> area just act, but we lose a lot of time by waiting too much. 

That's a philosophical point :-) Just acting is not always the best
way to do things.  This may lead to race condition :-) Anyway, I hope
the solution I suggested above (adding the documentation to my
hurd-web page) should be good.
 
> If there's a better place for the documentation, it's trivial to just copy 
> the 
> info there later on.  The only thing which is hard to fix are pages which 
> have 
> very many manual backlinks.  Everything else can be done in minutes.  
> (that's one thing we gain from having the wiki in version control)

I'm afraid this could introduce ugliness in the history.

It has just occurred to me that a fair part of my thinking about this
problem is occupied by taking care of the history being nice.  I
wonder whether it's normal :-(
 
> PS: I now use the wiki via Mercurial and the hg-git extension.  That way I 
> avoid getting bitten by git again ;) 
> I only need got for *creating* short-lived branches (sicne I can already do 
> the merging from mercurial). 

That's great :-)

Seeing how advertently you propagate Mercurial in every applicable
task, I think I'll have to have a look at it :-) It should be worth
the time ;-)

Regards,
scolobb