Re: [Monotone-devel] patch serieses

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 03:06:45PM +1100, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> I was a little confused looking at njs's A, B, C diagram, especially
> when it came to the reordering.  I didn't like that A polluted B, etc,
> especially when that had to be undone.  My personal preference would
> be to develop A, B, C independently, and establish the ordering and
> dependencies between them via propagates to integration branches:
[...]
> The other use model (linux kernel) seems to me to be mostly an
> artifact of historical practice driven by deficiencies and mismatches
> in different VCS sytems, rather than an explicit preference to
> maintain things as patches in their primary form.  For review and
> approval they can be generated as above.

No, I think you misunderstand (what I perceive to be) the primary use
case for quilt-style tools.  To do what you want to do, monotone's
existing branch support seems pretty sufficient (at least to me, tell
us if I'm wrong :-)). But quilt is designed primarily to support a
workflow where the output of your hacking is not a patch implementing
some feature, but a whole _series_ of patches that together implement
your one feature.  Why do such a silly thing?  Because it makes things
easier to review -- you can split up your big change into a bunch of
smaller changes each of which can be reviewed in turn.

In this case, there almost always _are_ dependencies between the
changes, and in fact that's much of the point, because each patch
makes the next one possible.  Not always -- if you wanted to be really
fancy, you could make some arbitrary DAGs of patches -- but since the
primary purpose is reviewing (and perhaps for later hackers trying to
work out what happened historically), you might as well just make it a
sequence, that's the easiest thing to read and understand.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
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