Commenti a: HYM – Help you to merge

Di: l3on

l3on — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:19:35 +0000

Hi Jono!

Thank you for the suggestion! I’ll read it asap. Yesterday I talked with Daniel Holbach, he invited me to contact MOTUs and get more feedbacks about. I hope you’ll join the discussion in ML (I’ll open it in the next days).

Ciao!

Di: Jono Bacon

Jono Bacon — Tue, 31 May 2011 15:20:40 +0000

Interesting post, Leo. I wrote up a similar idea a while back called Mergimus:

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/30/mergimus-making-patch-and-branch-review-easier-in-ubuntu/

Maybe some interesting ideas there too.

Jono

Di: OdyX

OdyX — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:04:50 +0000

l3on: your intention is noble, but I can't agree with you. What Ubuntu needs is not more merges, but less, because that means less work. Less merges means that the pertinent Ubuntu changes have been merged to Debian (and eventually upstream) and benefit a wider part of the free software community. So no, I don't think this application is needed and I tend to think it will do more harm than good to the Debian-Ubuntu relationship.

Di: l3on

l3on — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:56:57 +0000

Hi OdyX…

Your words are very interesting. It seems your point of view is “an app like this one is useless”. I think that untill Debian and Ubuntu still remain different distros, there will be a lot of packages to merge (I’m not a “fulltime” developer, so I could miss a lot of things).
To increase communication between developers we can add a new feature at the application, usefull to open a new bug in Debian in order to report changes to original maintainer.

What do you think about?

Di: l3on

l3on — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:43:53 +0000

Thank you!

Di: OdyX

OdyX — Mon, 30 May 2011 12:54:54 +0000

In my Very humble and biased opinion, I think this tool takes the problem from the wrong end.
This eventual tool solves the “how to make merges easier?” question, where I think the question should be “why is there a need for merges in the first place?”. The answer to this question is sometimes
a) “because people from Ubuntu haven’t taken time to contact the original Debian maintainers to talk about the differences and reduce them to minimal”
b) “because Debian is frozen and we need those changes anyway”
c) …

In my recent experiences in the collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian on specific problems, we could always find ways to avoid the need of merges for Ubuntu. This has happenned by using git branches, by making smart use of the dpkg-vendor tool, etc. Then merges are not necessary anymore.

Again, IMHO, work should be done to increase collaboration between _people_ on a single repository instead of building _tools_ to ease forking (which this tool looks like).

Di: toobuntu

toobuntu — Mon, 30 May 2011 12:49:18 +0000

You may want to start with taking a look at debreate and extending its existing codebase: http://debreate.sourceforge.net/