Re: The direction linux is taking

Troy Benjegerdes
2001-12-27T21:43:53Z

[snip]

> > > but your typical SCM has the end user doing the merges, not the maintainer.
> > > If you had an SCM system which allowed the maintainer to do all or some of
> > > the merging, would that help?
> >
> > Well, that's what the filesystem is for me right now ;)
>
> Yes, and it works great for easy merges. It sucks for complicated merges.
> BK can help you a great deal with those merges.

There is a point to be made though that if *Linus* has to do a complicated
merge, the 'patch' that caused the merge should probably be suspect in the
first place.

The person sending the patch should be the one responsible for resolving a
complicated merge. If BK makes that easier, great. HOWEVER, I don't really
want Linus to be using some tool that does automerging.. No SCM system and
automerge tool is going to understand what the code *means*, unless it's
got a compiler integrated into it.

I've had some strange things happen on a BK automerge in the past, and I
don't trust any automated system that doesn't understand the code to not
make some subtle semantic mistake. (Mind you, when strange things
happened, the code usually worked, and I didn't notice until I tried to
*manually* prepare a 'patch' to send upstream)

--
Troy Benjegerdes | master of mispeeling | 'da hozer' | hozer@drgw.net
-----"If this message isn't misspelled, I didn't write it" -- Me -----
"Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it
because life wouldn't have any meaning for them if they didn't. That's
why I draw cartoons. It's my life." -- Charles Schulz