Re: git-rerere observations and feature suggestions

From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Date: Jun 16, 2008, 19:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20080616195252.GA18848@elte.hu>
In-Reply-To: <20080616112709.GG12260@mit.edu>

* Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 01:01:13PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >    ( Also, it's a GPL nitpicky issue: the conflict resolution database 
> >      can be argued to be part of "source code" and as such it should be 
> >      shared with everyone who asks. With trivial merges the data is
> >      probably not copyrightable hence probably falls outside the scope 
> >      of the GPL, but with a complex topic tree like -tip with dozens of 
> >      conflict resolutions, the boundary is perhaps more blurred. )
> 
> For a more complex merge resolution, granted that it rises to the 
> level of being "copyrightable", but I think it would be a huge stretch 
> to call the rr-cache the "preferred form for modifications"!  :-)

yeah - i'm not really arguing any detail of the GPL here. I'm arguing the principle: there should be no technical assymetry between maintainer and contributor. So if i am able to run an effort-free integration of 85 topic branches, i'd like contributors (who will eventually grow up into co-maintainer roles in the future) to be able to do the same, if they want to do so.

right now that is simply not possible technically - it's even very hard to share a .git/rr-cache with a co-maintainer whom i can trust with my index file. (which is an otherwise unsafe private binary cache that i'd not put into a public repository as it could in theory contain lots of unrelated data and is not endian-safe, etc.)

	Ingo