[oe] OT: pull requests, merges and bisection (was: OE TSC Meeting 2011/02/21 Minutes)

[Chris Larson]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 3:55 PM, Paul Menzel
<paulepanter at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> it is great that the minutes of the meetings get published. Thank you.
>
>
> Am Donnerstag, den 24.02.2011, 09:20 -0700 schrieb Tom Rini:
>
> […]
>
>> Not clear in the summary but from the logs is that we want to, as part
>> of making this be transparent, publish guidelines for how this will
>> work, based on what poky is doing now.  The high level plan is to follow
>> the contrib tree model that poky has which means sending pull requests
>> (which in turn also post the patches to the ML for review).
>>
>> For changes that don't have a tree to pull from, someone with write
>> access would need to pick them up.
>
> XBMC is using also an approach with pull requests. The Linux kernel is
> doing that also. Is there documentation on how pull requests, merges and
> bisecting works together?
>
> My problem is that pull requests are based on a certain commit in
> origin/master. After the request is sent most of the time several
> commits are pushed to origin/master in the mean time, so a merge is
> necessary “polluting” the commit history.

I don't really see a problem with it, personally.  It's not pollution
if it's useful information, and recording the point where the branch
was brought it can indeed be useful information.

> With my current knowledge I find it very difficult to track down bad
> commits especially if commits break the builds in between. Does `git
> bisect` take care of that itself? How do the Linux developers deal with
> that problem, especially merge conflicts?

Well, you can mark commits that are broken for unrelated reasons with
bisect, but ideally people would use something like git test-sequence
combined with rebase to ensure that there are no points in their
commits which will break bisect, and *that* gets merged to master.  I
think it's pretty important to retain bisectability (not a word, I
know :) on our branches.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics