[Gnu-arch-users] taglines vs explicit (was Linus Torvalds <address@hidden> Re: log-buf-len dynamic)

[Pau Aliagas]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> Miles sent a patch for cscvs a few days ago, he could send ascii armored
> patchsets in the future instead.

I think that cscvs already tries to detect renames automatically.

> Probably they won't be much bigger than a compacted regular patch + changelog 
> +
> mv foo.c foo2.c at the end (again no unique-id:
> xxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxx, that's a workaround).

You are wrong with the implicit tags. They are unvaluable in large 
projects. Imagine that you are reorganising a part of your tree, move 
files and dirs around, edit etc. now you want to sync with mainstream.

Unless there's some kinf of tagging, be it inlined, be it explicit, you'll 
easyly lose track of the files to patch.

What do I mean? What you call "strict commit" is nothing else than 
explicit tagging + untagged = junk. We are saying the same thing: we need 
a tag per file. You chose to add it via a command (it really goes to a 
.arch_ids/file). There's people, and I count among them, that prefers 
inserting the tag inside the file and forget completely about it.

Semantically, we do the same thing, but whilst you'll have to mv the tag
manually for renames, I'll just mv the file and be done. I too do have
strict commit. And, if I want, I also can use the commands to tag files.

People recommended you to use tagline instead of exlicit beacause it's a 
superset of its functionality: you can do the same (tag manually or stric 
commit as you like t call it) and ou can have tags in your files.

Moreover, imagine that I start feeding you a new driver for the kernel. 
Probably I'd stick a tagline inside :) and you'd have to live with it. 
Better let both trees be "star-mergeable". And this will happen, peopl 
will start tagging their linux trees from the master one.

There's no automatic procedure for moving from one method to the other, so 
that if you chose one, You'll have to stick with it (or suffer a massive 
delete/add).

Please, think twice about it. If want to have a master arch tree of the 
linux kernel, it would much better with taglines, even if most of the 
files are explicitly tagged.

Pau