[Box Backup-dev] Where to put my bug fixes?

[Martin Ebourne]

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 14:29 +0100, Chris Wilson wrote:
> That would be a bit difficult, because there are often several revisions 
> before arriving at the final version of a particular change. I was trying 
> to do that by posting patches to the list, with comments, but they were 
> ignored. Ben suggested that I should be trying to track the changes 
> through SVN, so I created the merge branch.

I agree that we should do this through svn. As to several revisions to a
change, that's no problem, just list each related revision together as a
group, which is what I was suggesting.

> What I've done so far with the merge branch is committed all the patches 
> that I think are uncontroversial. I understand that there are a 
> significant number of them, but I think they are the trivial ones, not 
> requiring explanation, so I committed them in one go.

Ok, I understand what you did now. I can work with that. I've still got
the patches in my mailbox so I'll go back and look over them.

> Therefore, I propose to 
> separate out individual changes from general, and merge them to the merge 
> branch one at a time, with comments. I will point these commits out to the 
> dev mailing list, and remind people about them until they are committed to 
> trunk. This will be rather a slow process, I'm afraid.

This could work, though just giving us the revision numbers on the
current branch would probably be easier and just as effective.

> I hope that this process satisfies everyone, but comments, questions and 
> constructive criticism are welcome.

One thing I'm concerned about is that when this is all merged into trunk
that the revision history there is ok to follow. ie. Unrelated changes
should preferably be merged into trunk in their own commits with
sensible comments. Related or larger changes on a branch by themselves
could be merged in one go as long as they only come from one branch.
It's ok to see a branch merge and go and check the history of the
branch, but doesn't work well if the branches have been copied around
and partially merged, makes it time consuming to see what happened
where.

Cheers,

Martin.