[petsc-dev] 'master' RESET after bad merge! - 'tisaac/thplex' was based on 'next'

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:
> This is truly a low point for your argument. You are not arguing against the
> usefulness, nor that automation is better than doing it by hand, but that it
> did not happen for a while and moral use of VC dictates that you do it
> manually?
> That is crazy.

A human has to review branches before merging.  Full stop.  There is no
other option until computers become so advanced that they put
programmers out of business.

When you review a branch, you see what commits are coming in.  If you
don't review the branch, there are countless ways to merge things that
you don't want.  The specific accident of merging 'next' into 'master'
or 'maint' is not the worst and actually fairly easy to notice.

And now we're back to my request: if you want the system to enforce
policy, make a concrete proposal for the precise semantics.  Otherwise
take heart that the mistake we're babbling on about cannot occur if we
do our jobs of reviewing branches before merging them.
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