[Pm-utils] [RFC] Switch to git, opening up for external contributors

[Victor Lowther]

On Jan 30, 2008 5:41 AM, Stefan Seyfried <seife at suse.de> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 05:19:58PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Hi everyone!
> >
> > pm-utils is becoming more and more important as hal is pushing for it
> > as preferred power management backend. A lot of distributions are
> > using hal/pm-utils nowadays but they have to carry around a lot of
> > distro specific patches. It's almost as every distro has an own "fork"
> > of pm-utils.
> > Unfortunately the acceptance of external patches has been very low.
> > Would it be possible to open up the project for external contributions?
> >
> > As a first step, I'd propose to move to a more modern SCM, like git.
>
> Why? CVS was never the problem of pm-utils.

In that case, what have been the problems with pm-utils?  I want to
make pm-utils usable on as many different types of systems as feasible
-- everything from big-iron servers to end-user desktop and laptop
systems all the way down to tiny embedded devices.  It sounds like
your input would be very useful in accomplishing that goal, but so far
your response has been more hostile than I think is called for.

> > As a second step, to share the workload, more people should get commit
> > access, like the Mandriva, openSUSE and Debian maintainers, which have
> > posted a lot of patches during the last months.
>
> This would be the first project for me where i would need to use git
> and i am not interested in that at all, especially as it does not help
> anything.

Git has been very useful to me so far -- the POSIX patch series was
not originally created using git, and it shows in the patches.  That
is a fault with the way I originally created the patches, though, and
not with git.

Since then, though, I have picked up a few very useful tricks, such as
tracking three branches at once (the upstream branch, a branch
containing the changes I am working on for location independence, and
a branch containing more updates in the spirit of the POSIX changes).
Git makes keeping all three branches in sync trivial (using git rebase
to keep the other branches in sync with upstream, git-cherry-pick to
selectivly apply patches from upstream into the other branches, and
git-format-patch and git-diff to make patchbombs for commit and
review).  Doing all that in CVS (or SVN) can get rather tricky,
especially when it comes time to merge branches back together.

> --
> Stefan Seyfried
> R&D Team Mobile Devices            |              "Any ideas, John?"
> SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nürnberg | "Well, surrounding them's out."
>
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