[Libreoffice] About merging and people not paying attention

[Robert Nagy]

On (2011-07-27 10:03), Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-07-27 at 14:35 +0200, Robert Nagy 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.
> 
> So, I basically agree with you that we all need to be careful when
> merging etc.  Having said that, when you have a branch with a large set
> of code changes to merge, sometimes your mind slips and occasionally you
> overlook one or two things.  So, I don't want us to resort to this
> accusatory tone of voice when something like this happens.
> 
> And I don't think any one of us want to introduce breaks intentionally,
> and I tend to believe that we developers do spend reasonable amount of
> time double-checking changes unless there is evidence to support
> otherwise.  So, let's just take it as it is, and try to be supportive &
> fix things instead of going on a rampage to put a blame on those who
> work hard to improve the code base.
> 
> I'm pretty sure you mean well, but I'm just a bit concerned about your
> tone of voice in your email.

I did not say that it was intentional but I am so used to people testing
only one platform because they just don't give a damn about the others.

If a patch/merge touches all of the platform files then it should be
sent to the developers responsible for that part of the tree directly,
instead of sending it to the development mailing list which has too many
traffic to actually follow (for me at least).