Re: [gentoo-dev] On banning merge commits

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 8:18 AM, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9 May 2016 at 00:09, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> 1. announce to gentoo-dev@ the intention to start a branch intending to
>> merge
>>
>> 2. hack hack hack
>>
>> 3. test the merge for any conflicts etc,
>>
>> 4. announce to the list a date/time to merge
>>
>> 5. if okay, ermge
>
> It would make much sense for this series to be visible on Master as a
> "add Perl 5.24 to tree" commit, because all the changes are inherently
> interdependent,
> and it would make little sense to rewind to a specific point within
> that series and use it as a portage tree.
>
> But that's not significant enough to warrant a lot of formal fluffing around.
>
> It for sure would be best if that 100 commit range was rebased before
> merging, but it should still be a non-fast-forward merge just to keep
> the history logical.
>

++

merges shouldn't just be used for random pull-requests.  However, when
you're touching multiple packages/etc they should be considered.  They
should also be considered if for some reason you had a bazillion
commits to a single package that for some reason shouldn't be rebased.
I imagine that they'll be a small portion of commits as a result.
However, for the situations where they're appropriate they make a lot
of sense.

This was some of Duncan's point, but I will comment that we'll never
have as clean a history as the kernel simply because we don't have a
release-based workflow with the work cascading up various trees.  The
kernel is almost an ideal case for a merge-based workflow.  I imagine
that half of Gentoo's commit volume is random revbumps and keyword
changes and that is just going to be noise no matter what.  If we were
release-based we could do that stuff in its own branch and merge it
all in at once, but that just isn't us.

--
Rich