[oe] A question of workflow

[Matthew Palmer]

On Sun, Dec 31, 2006 at 10:45:43AM +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Richard Purdie schreef:
> > On Sun, 2006-12-31 at 10:59 +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> >> Note also that Richard said that I shouldn't be doing *any* commits locally
> >> -- no mention of branching or any other way to take advantage of the
> >> benefits of a DRCS.  (Not having a go at you, Richard, just explaining my
> >> thought processes.)
> > 
> > This is simply because we have no established way of receiving data
> > through the SCM for merging into trunk without direct write access. As
> > my other email says, I'd like to find a way of supporting that but its
> > probably an education issue on both sides.
> 
> And the fact that we usually have to tweak 80% if the patches we receive.

So you propagate the contributed branch to the dev tree, then make the
changes that are needed to fix it up as a separate changeset.  That
maintains full history for everyone.

> Attaching them to the bugtracker makes it easy to search for, view and
> comment on patches, and most importantly, view their status.

The problem with just dealing in raw patches is that when I'm maintaining my
local tree, a branch of the upstream repo, my patches come back to me after
getting applied upstream without any context, so that I get all manner of
spurious conflicts.  It looks as though all I can do to try and avoid this
is disapprove patches, I can't "unpropagate" a whole branch to prevent the
conflict -- and that assumes that I know in advance that the patch is coming
back down.  Far better to have the SCM do that all for me.

> It doesn't matter which SCM we use with that workflow.

Which does make me wonder why you went with monotone instead of the
lowest-common-denominator, since you don't appear to be using any of
monotone's more interesting features?

- Matt