Re: Gnus overrides.texi and WEBHACKDEVEL

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
 > > Cc: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>,
 > >     address@hidden,
 > >     address@hidden
 > > Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2011 15:49:08 +0900
 > > 
 > > Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > 
 > >  > By "user" I _did_ mean developers in this case.  How do we prevent the
 > >  > danger of committing a modified file?
 > > 
 > > By using a real branch instead of a checkout.
 > 
 > Are you saying that "bzr push" will somehow catch these problems where
 > "bzr commit" in a bound branch doesn't?

Of course not.  I'm saying that one needs to use an appropriate
workflow to get the desired behavior.  Bazaar is *designed* to make it
easy to screw up this way because it is a *feature* for most people.
Your mileage apparently varies here.  Of course, Bazaar *also* makes
it easy to adapt workflows so that one must try to screw up this way.
The choice is yours.

Note that it *must* be yours.  The tool has to trust the user to know
what she's doing; if she says "commit", it commits; if she has things
so that "commit" to mean "commit and push if possible", it should do
that.  At least Bazaar gives you that choice.  The behavior you
dislike here is exactly the behavior you would get from CVS or
Subversion in a similar workflow, with no choice.

 > Even if so, the wiki recommends to use a bound branch, and I assume
 > most (if not all) committers indeed use that.

The wiki does *not* recommend *committing new content* in the bound
branch.  It recommends *pushing* "through" it to the public
repository.  (At least it did when I last touched it; wikis being what
they are, I don't know if it still recommends that.)

There are reasons why I was at such pains to discourage use of
checkouts.  This is one: you are simply running into the limitations
of simplistic workflows.

It seems to me that Emacs has arrived at the point where some of the
folks (but by far not all) who resisted sophisticated workflows are
going to have to bite the bullet and learn them, and specifically
learn some of the details of how Bazaar implements them.