How to cope with patches sanely

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:04:10 -0500, David Nusinow <dnusinow at speakeasy.net> said: 

> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 03:56:49AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> No, it does not. If branch A has pi = 2.34567; and branch B has pi =
>> 3.14159;
>> 
>> No matter how much quilting you do you cannot reconcile the
>> fundamental conflict in the final. Either pi is 3.14159; or it is
>> not; and if branch A requires pi not to be that value, and branch B
>> requires pi to be that value, quilt can't make C be quantum like and
>> have the value be both.

> Feature branches don't magically allow you to avoid merge conflicts
> either, so this is a red herring. Once you've resolved the conflict,
> then it becomes just another change. This change can become a diff in
> a stack of diffs.

        This whole message is a red herring, since hte feature branches
 do not attempt to handle merge conflicts -- that is not their purpose.
 They capture one single feature, independently from every other
 feature, and thumb their collective noses at merge conflicts.

        The history of the integration branch captures the integration
  effort; and the integration branch makes no effort to keep the
integration work up to date with current upstream and feature
branches. 

        If you think you can extract an up to date integration patch
 from the entrails of the integration branch -- feel free o smack
 me down.  But please provide some substance to the assertion that it is
 doable.

        manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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