Re: [PATCH] Implement git-quiltimport

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: May 16, 2006, 19:01 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbqtxaj5k.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <m1bqtx6el6.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>

ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

>    Given the ugliness in -mm making it an error to have an
>    non-attributed patch would result in people specifying --author
>    when they really don't know who the author is, giving us much
>    less reliable information.
>
>    Possibly what we need is an option to not make it an error so that
>    people doing this kind of thing in their own trees have useful
>    information.

I agree it is probably a good way to error by default, optinally allowing to say "don't care". I do not think Linus would pull from such a tree or trees branched from it into his official tree, so I do not think we would need to worry about commits with incomplete information propagating for this particular "gitified mm" usage. But as a general purpose tool to produce "gitified quilt series" tree, we would.

It depends on the expected use of the resulting gitified mm tree.

If it is for an individual developer to futz with and tweak upon, and the end result from the work leaves such a "gitified quilt series" repository only as a patch form, then not having to figure out and specify authorship information to many patches is probably a plus; the information will not be part of the official history recorded elsewhere anyway.

However, if it is to produce a reference git tree to point people at, (i.e. the quiltimport script is run once per a series by somebody and the result is published for public use), I would imagine we would want to have the attribution straight, so if the tool has to "guess", it should either error out or go interactive and ask.