Re: The direction linux is taking

Geert Uytterhoeven
2002-01-02T15:07:06Z

On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > Anyway, I'm interested to see if there are screams of "all I ever do is
> > merge and I hate it" or "merging? what's that?".
>
> I've only been keeping this tree since the beginning of the month,
> so I'm still trying to find my feet a little, but so far merging is
> pretty straightforward and usually painless.
>
> The procedure when Linus/Marcelo release a new patch usually goes..
>
> 1. edit the patch to remove any bits that don't make sense
> (eg, I have newer/better version in my tree)
> 2. cat ../patch-2.5.x | patch -p1 --dry-run
> 3. edit the patch to remove already present hunks.
> 4. manually fix up rejects in my tree, and remove reject hunk
> from the diff.
> 5. back to (1) until no rejects.
> 6. cat ../patch-2.5.x | patch -p1
> 7. testing..
> 8. Create new diff, and give it a quick readthrough.
>
> Out of all this the initial patch review (step #1) and the final
> lookover are by far the most time consuming, and I don't think any
> automated tool could speed this up and give me the same level of
> understanding over what I'm merging.

When I was bringing the m68k tree back in sync near the end of 1999, I used the
following approach:
- keep all trees, use `cp -rl' and `patch' when a new version is released
(cfr. Al Viro)
- use `same' to prevent the need for zillions of disk space, and to make the
creation of diffs between such trees fast
- merge trees using my home-brew `mergetree' perl script (basically a
recursive `merge' command), which can replace the destination file by a
hard link if it's the same as one of the originals

Despite having a real CVS repository for m68k now, I still use mergetree...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds