[Libreoffice] About merging and people not paying attention

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Robert Nagy <robert at openbsd.org> wrote:
> I would like to ask my fellow developers to be more careful
> about merging and _touching_ files at all that they don't
> understand. During the last two days I had to fix several
> problems that were introduced by merging changes, hell I
> even found files with _conflicts_ in them and the guy who
> pushed it did not even bother to have a look.
> This is painful and tiring, so whenever you merge, please
> double check before pushing and please do not touch files
> that you don't understand because you _will_ break things.
>
> A good example is 3ad912abd7c2106c4ba6cd35e2ead954759d5cc8.
> Just egrep for '(<<<|>>>)'

Robert,

Having done massive merge with conflicting files numbering in the
thousands, I would be less quick to throw a stone here.
I also had to iron some kink on MacOs this week-end as a fallback of
gnumake4 merge... but all in all it 'cost' me few hours for the
benefit of the whole gnumake4.
I'm sure glad I did not have to pass the dozen and dozen of hours it
took to extract the relevant part of a cws and merge them onto a
moving target....
been there, done that, glad someone else took the bullet this time.

So sure, that sound like a 'oops' moment... but put it in context. all
in all that is a pretty low rate of screw-up.
Certainly from your angle that is 100% screw-up because the _one_ file
that is core to your build got hosed... but you should not conclude
that it is because the dev did not care, but because that was one file
in a thousand he had to deal with, and that he had no environment to
check against....

And please, please avoid stuff like : "please do not touch files that
you don't understand because you _will_ break things."
Presuming incompetence is un-called for, and in that particular case
comedic, since you are basically telling that the guy that basically
designed the new build system and converted a bunch of the of dmake to
gbuild do not 'understand' the build system... gee, we are in trouble
indeed :-)

maybe an active tinderbox would help other realized they broke your
platform, and maybe fix things they accidentally broke before you ran
into them ?

Norbert