[petsc-dev] close ts-fixes branch?

[Matthew Knepley]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Mar 2010, Kai Germaschewski wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Lisandro Dalcin <dalcinl at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > On 25 March 2010 01:14, Kai Germaschewski <kai.germaschewski at unh.edu>
> > > wrote:
> > > > Fine with me (I'm the one who introduced it originally).
> > > >
> > > > My off-topic 2 cents: I hate reply-to headers.
> > > >
> > >
> > > BTW, I think this is an example of bad usage of mercurial branches...
> > > You should use a separate clone for these kind of tasks. Mercurial
> > > branches would make more sense for release versus development,
> > > although even PETSc does not uses this model. IMHO, creating a branch,
> > > push some fixes, merge back to default, and close branch is just
> > > repository pollution.
> > >
> >
> > I actually disagree on this. The ts-fixes branch was a separate clone in
> the
> > beginning, actually. I did go through the efforts of separating this into
> a
> > sequence of patches, instead of having one "this one patch fixes all
> > approach", and whereas maybe for that particular case it could be
> considered
> > overkill, in general I consider it highly useful to break up changes into
> > pieces that can actually be verified by looking at them.
>
> agree to this.
>
> > So the way I see it, there are basically three ways to merge a change
> like
> > this (or any which is a sequence of patches) into the main repo:
> >
> > 1) do them in a separate branch, then merge that branch (and close the
> > branch, which I didn't but should have (mercurial used to not even
> support
> > this, a major shortcoming...)
> > 2) do them as a sequence on the top of head directly. Unfortunately, that
> > goes wrong if someone else changes head while working on the sequence of
> > patches. In that case, you end up with two branches which will merge with
> a
> > merge changeset. That's effectively the same thing as 1), branching and
> > joining, except that the branch doesn't have an explicit name, but I
> don't
> > really see the difference. If you guys don't like the explicit naming, I
> can
> > certainly adapt to that...
>
> generally in-repo-branch and a clone should have similar workflow and
> features. the eqivalent of the 'branch-name' for a clone is the
> 'clone-url'.
>
> For eg: for petsc-dev use use http://petsc.cs.iit.edu/petsc/petsc-dev, and
> for
> petsc-3.1 its http://petsc.cs.iit.edu/petsc/petsc-release-3.1
>
> [whereas if this were implemented as repo-branch - there would be a
> branch-tag]
>
> So one can do either in-repo branches or clone branches [with similar
> workflow] - so I prefer clone branches.
>
> > 3) Just import the patch (with some manual trickery) into head as a
> single
> > changeset -- for obvious reasons, I don't think this is a good way, and
> > history is lost.
>
> Yes this is not good.
>
> >
> > Both 1) and 2) have the disadvantage of introducing potentially lots of
> > merge changesets if development goes on for a while while head moves,
> too,
> > and one keeps the branch in sync. git handles this case by doing a
> "rebase"
> > instead of "merge" which keeps one's development clean (but one needs to
> be
> > careful with distributing things along the way, as history gets
> rewritten.)
>
> Hg also has rebase. With clone repos - one has to be careful as to do
> this only with local/unshared changeset. Perhaps this works with
> in-branch clones aswell [I've never explored]
>
> >
> > Anyway, this probably shouldn't lead to a git vs hg discussion, but I've
> > used mercurial as my main tool for various things for quite a while, and
> > recently learned more about git, and for me it solves a lot of the
> annoying
> > little things I kept running into with hg. Including having a gui that
> let's
> > you go through changes before commiting them, and separating them, so you
> > don't need to do "can't remember what the heck I changed -- I wish
> mercurial
> > had a frontend like bk" commits.
>
> I use 'qct' for this. Perhaps its not as feature rich as it should be
> - but its decent. [it supports git and other tools aswell]
>
> > (By the way, even for hg there's "hg diff" and "hg diff | diffstat"
> > which helps...) I used to work on the linux kernel with bk, so it's
> > probably no surprise that git seems to support the kind of workflow
> > I'm used to, though...
>
> One thing hg lacks is the 'bk revtool' - where its easy to browse
> history. Yeah one can browse history on the web interface - but its
> not as good as the revtool.


The Murky tool on the Mac can do all this stuff. Sean and I
are going to start developing it.

   Matt


>
> Satish

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments
is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments
lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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