Re: The direction linux is taking

Benjamin LaHaise
2001-12-29T21:03:59Z

On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 11:37:49AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> If you have N people trying to patch the same file, you'll require N
> releases and some poor shlep is going to have to resubmit their patch
> N-1 times before it gets in.

Wrong. Most patches are independant, and even touch different functions.
Things like "add member foo of type baz to struct z" are independant
changes even if they conflict when patching.

> 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?".

How about "I'm sick of resending this one line bugfix to maintainer of
$foo who keeps dropping it"? That's the problem that patchbot is meant
to solve, not the merging problem. If the people responsible for applying
patches were perfect, we wouldn't need it.

-ben