It does indeed and I think this is a far more serious issue than, for
example, the shouting SCCS subdirectories. So let's discuss it.
> Changesets sent by 'bk send' are also much harder to read than
> unidiffs ;)
Yeah but if you do a bk send -d it prefixes them with unidiffs or
you can do
cat patch | bk receive /home/bk/vmtree
cd /home/bk/vmtree/RESYNC
bk csets
and you are looking at the changes in the changeset viewer which most
people think is nicer than unidiffs.
> I think for bitkeeper to be useful for the kernel we really need:
>
> 1) 'bk send' format Linus can read easily
That's done.
> 2) the ability to send individual changes (for example, the
> foo_net.c fixes from 1.324 and 1.350) in one nice unidiff
That's possible now but not a really good idea.
> 3) the ability for Linus to apply patches that are slightly
> "out of order" - a direct consequence of (2)
This is really the main point. There are two issues, one is out of order
and the other is what we call "false dependencies". I think it is the
latter that bites you most of the time. The reason you want out of order
is because of the false dependencies, at least that is my belief, let
me tell you what they are and you tell me.
Suppose that you make 3 changes, a driver change, a vm change, and a
networking change. Suppose that you want to send the networking change
to Linus. With patch, you just diff 'em and send and hope that patch
can put it together on the other end. With BK as it stands today, there
is a linear dependency between all three changes and if you want to send
the networking change, you also have to send the other 2.
How much of the out order stuff goes away if you could send changes out
of order as long as they did not overlap (touch the same files)?
----- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/