possible scm change for busybox dev

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 12 June 2006 1:32 pm, Erik Hovland wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 11:25:20AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> > (In the long run, I'm pondering switching to something like git so
> > clashing patches don't bring everything to a halt until the next time I'm
> > connected to the net...)
>
> If developers are specifically being sloppy about checking in, then
> there is not going to be a fix for this problem if you allow the same
> people to push to your public git repo.

There's no coordination between developers at all.  (Erik's way of working and 
my way of working are different.)

> I would say that there needs to be some address of workflow for all devs
> instead of an scm change If you adopted a workflow that was much like
> the linux kernel's workflow, then git would probably be right.

The linux kernel's workflow is that Linus pulls, and thus there isn't a single 
change that goes into Linus's tree that he didn't put there, and never has 
been.

I inherited a situation from Erik where there are a bunch of developers who 
are used to checking whatever they feel like directly into the tree in the 
absence of any maintainer at all, without any sort of coordination or warning 
or anything.  And when I didn't do the -stable releases like that, some of 
them got deeply indignant.  (I didn't care.)

Unfortunately, the situation actually tends to slow me down tremendously, 
because every time I sit down to address the patch backlog I find out that 
random unrelated changes have already been made to the tree and I have to 
stop and look at those instead of doing what I was preparing to do.  I 
prepared a patch series over the weekend (like the kernel's "x of y" chains), 
and found out that the very first patch was blocked by changes that had 
occurred to the tree in my absence, at which point I gave up and went to bed.

> That may be easy seeing as Bernhard seems to behave a lot like Andrew
> Morton.

Preparing a bunch of patches to feed into my tree?  Not really, no.

> Although I would say the Rob is actually better at reigning in 
> development then Linus is.

Saying no I'm good at.

> Having said that, I have enjoyed using git for other projects and would
> not consider it a bad choice.
>
> Just in mentioning. Subversion has efficient branching (unlike cvs), you
> may be able to use that and a different merging workflow to get what you
> need out of an scm.

I don't really get to do much independent development anymore.  Ever since I 
took a day job, I barely have enough time to keep up with all the email and 
patches people send me.  Reviewing and merging other people's patches is 
pretty darn time consuming.  Having to stop what I'm working on to deal with 
the tree changing out from under me basically makes it impossible to do 
anything else...

> The OE project has used monotone with some success. My main problem with
> both subversion and monotone is a lack of cherry-picking feature. Which
> is probably the most powerful feature of git. But your current workflow
> does not seem to require it much.

I gave up on being able to cherry pick.  If I don't respond fast enough, one 
of the other people with svn commit access will just check their own version 
into the tree, whether I want it in there or not.

This is the situation I inherited.  I never would have set it up this way...

> Just food for thought.
>
> E

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.