Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Maintainership, and whiners...

[Martin Langhoff]

On 10/14/05, Mark Flacy <address@hidden> wrote:
> > If they don't get bitten by the dragons, what are the chances that my
> > puny projects will?
>
> Because there are things that you would do in another language (say
> Java) that you wouldn't do in C.
>
> For instance, I just might refactor some public class into two new

Understood. Pickaxe will find your code's ancestry, and if someone
comes up with a "fallback" intelligent merger that is Java
practices-smart (most probably abusing the pickaxe facility a bit) it
may automate some of this merging.

OTOH, in the scenario you are describing, I would find myself
reworking the new base class quite a bit to optimize it for
"inheritability", and so non-trivial patches to the original class
would probably fail, and even if they didn't... well, I'd want to
decide whether they should be in the base class or in a subclass.

So you've just described a scenario where any automated tool is going
to do the wrong thing more often than not.

> I'd be amazed if the guessing algorithm the kernel team uses would get
> that correct.

I'd be amazed to find an algorithm that figures your scenario out
right  at the semantic level _and_ gets it right more than 80% of the
time. You clearly need to merge by hand in that situation.

cheers,


martin