Re: Basic Bazaar guide for Emacs hackers.

[Óscar Fuentes]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     What you are recommending is very easy for the individual developer
>     but makes for a messy history.
>
> Could you explain what you mean by messy?  Objectively, which are the
> characteristics you consider messy?  Knowing that, I could determine
> whether I agree with you.

I think Stephen is mixing things here.

People who work with dVCS often find convenient to commit to their local
branches from time to time before the feature is complete. This is most
convenient if you think on a complex feature that you divide on several
parts. As you implement each part, you commit to your local branch. Once
you completed the job, you send the changes upstream. This incorporates
your local commits on the upstream branch. Usually the rest of
developers are not interested on the steps you followed for implementing
your feature, so they want to see in the history:

  Implemented feature FooMatic

Instead of:

  Created stub functions
  Implemented the user interface
  Internal logic completed.
  Fixed a bug in foo-bar

With Bazaar you still can see that "inner history" if you ask for it,
but usually you don't care and seeing so many detail in the log would be
quite annoying. If you imagine several developers doing the same at the
same time the effect is even worse: the detailed inner history listed
above would be mixed with the commits of other developers. That's part
of the problem Stephen is talking about when he talks about "messy
history".

But the Emacs developers do not commit to CVS until the work is
finished. So if you keep committing only when the changes are ready for
mainline, the simple workflow I described on the wiki page is harmless
on this aspect.

-- 
Óscar