Re: rebasing topic/libposix

[Eric Blake]

On 05/04/2011 11:11 PM, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> Howdy Bruce,
> 
> On 5 May 2011, at 03:22, Bruce Korb <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Not being a GIT guru, I had previously done "git merge" to
>> synchronize topic/libposix with master.  Seemed straight
>> forward and obvious to me.  However, "rebase" is a better
>> spelling for the proper process of resynchronization.
> 
> I'm also very far from being a git guru - but I'm pretty sure that rebasing
> a public branch is a bad idea, especially for any poor souls who have a
> working copy in the existing libposix branch.

Rebasing a public branch is only acceptable if you make it equally
public that you are doing the rebase.  Otherwise, you are better off
doing a merge rather than a rebase.  For master, I don't like rebases,
but for other branches, I think a rebase is okay if it is
well-documented (with git.git, for example, the master branch only moves
forwards, pu branch is documented as always being rebased on a daily
basis, and the next branch is occasionally rebased along with a public
announcement - generally each time an x.y release is cut).

The question then comes on how to incorporate the branch back into
master.  We can temporarily relax the no-merge rule to allow a merge
commit, if that is what is necessary (Jim's done it in the past; witness
how the coreutils-8.9 branch was merged in - see commit 2aa56ddff).

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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