Re: Access to CVS

[Frank Terbeck <ft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Stephenson wrote:
> Aaron Schrab <aaron@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I'm still unclear about what is expected in regards to handling of
>> the mailing list links.  Why is it necessary to handle those
>> differently for git than is currently done with CVS, just mention the
>> sequence number in the commit message?
>
> I'm expecting (from my limited knowledge of git) that git-aware people
> will do the following:
>
> - Play with the change locally, committing it, possibly multiple times.
>   I don't see any reason you'd *have* to do this, it just strikes me
>   as the natural way a developer used to git would work, so you have
>   a record in the archive of what went to the list.  The ability to
>   do this is one of the big advantages of the distributed system.

Exactly. Potentially, you could refine a set of changes until you're
perfectly happy with it and not pile refinement upon refinement on top
of your original series as small commits.

With git, history only becomes immutable when it's made public (i.e.
pushed to a central server). Because when people base work off of it and
you still change it afterwards, the SHA1 sums will change and that'll
just blow up into the face of anyone who already worked with the old
history.

> - Send the overall diff of the changes to the mailing list.

Yup.

> - If it needs tweaking, there might be further local commits.

Right. That would be one of the refinements I talked about earlier.

> - When it looks OK, push the set of changes to the main repository.

Yes. And git helps with making things easier with external contributors
who don't have commit access (yet). Because git has things like
"git-am". With that you can just save a mail that contains a patch to a
file and feed it into "git am". It'll extract information like "author"
and "commit message" from the mail and commit everything in your local
repository, ready to be pushed.

> So the issue would be to associate the link at the point where it got
> pushed.

It would be great if we could make "git-am" process the X-Seq: header,
too. If that would be possible, integrating someone else's patch from
the mailing list would boil down to this:

  - Save the mail to a file.
  - git am foo.patch
  - git push


Regards, Frank

-- 
In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
                                                  -- RFC 1925