svn or arch

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 03:08:57PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> Cool.  It definitely seems to me there's a lot of interest in a new
> build system; there's mach, beehive, rookery, the fedora.us one, and
> probably tons of others.  Maybe we should make a new list for this; or
> maybe use the RPM list?

Maybe a Wiki? I wasn't even aware there are that many around <g>

> Well you need to define them somehow.  My idea was that the build system
> would automatically do a 3-way merge *at build time*, based on the
> Branch: headers.  If that failed, it failed the build and kicked it back
> to you, just like it does now for applying a patch.

Yes, but that would be awkard to work with. On a large project, I think
it would be slow, and it would be hard to maintain sane error reports.

> > However, it's still not clear how it's going to work. Without merging
> > patches, how do you know they don't conflict? 
> 
> You'd just build on your local machine for testing, or use a 'scratch'
> area in the build system.

Yeah, I can see that it can work, question is if this is the workflow
that you want. If I update the upstream package, I want to handle merge
conflicts at that time, not at build time. But maybe this is just me,
used to a certain way of doing things.

> > Even if they don't, they
> > may introduce fuzz for the others.
> 
> I think you'd want an option to disable fuzzy patch application for
> whatever RCS is in use; or maybe you get a build warning if there's a
> too-fuzzy patch; e.g. over 5 lines displacement?  This is just detail
> though.

Eh, devil is in the details though. The trick is to 'just use' the
RCS as much as possible IMO. And I clearly have arch in mind for
this task :)

> It's not clear to me that ordering is really all that useful if we make
> it easy to create new branches that merge from two conflicting branches.
> When would you want to reorder patches other than to work around
> conflicts?

If reordering is not a concern, it seems to me that branch-from-branch
method I'm proposing would be preferable, no?

-- 
Dimi.