Re: Merge with git-pasky II.

From: Bram Cohen <bram@bitconjurer.org>
Date: Apr 26, 2005, 21:28 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0504261400570.4678-100000@wax.eds.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504261347520.18901@ppc970.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds wrote:

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> On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Bram Cohen wrote:
> >
> > Now that you're done being dismissive, could you either (a) rebut my quite
> > detailed explanation of exactly why that functionality is both a dubious
> > idea and difficult to implement, or (b) admit that you have no plans
> > whatsoever for supporting any of this stuff? You can't have it both ways.
>
> I'm absolutely not going to do it myself, you're right about that.

Now you're just being an ass. I stated, flatly, that what you're proposing to have done (by you or whoever, for feasibility it doesn't matter which) is not going to happen due to just plain difficulty. You obviously disagree with me, but rather than coming out and saying so you're pretending I didn't make that statement.

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> > What I'd really like to hear is some explanation of why git is
> > reimplementing all of this stuff from scratch.
>
> Git does in ~5000 lines and two weeks of work what _I_ think is the right
> thing to do.

So you think that a system which supports snapshots and history but has no merging functionality whatsoever is the right thing? I'm asking this seriously. You have a magic --make-somebody-else-do-merge command, but for everybody else the current state of things is workable as a stopgap measure (the original plan) but very painful for anything more.

Codeville is comparable in terms of number of lines of code to Git, by the way.

> You're welcome to disagree, but the fact is, people have whined and
> moaned about my use of BK FOR THREE YEARS without showing me any better
> alternatives.

You were happy with BitKeeper, so why should we? Monotone and Codeville are only just about now really mature, and you aren't exactly known as a model customer.

> So why are you complaining now, when I implement my own version in two
> weeks?

I'm trying to tell you that the amount of time between now and when a system as nice as BitKeeper is in use by the kernel can be dramatically reduced by either using an existing system verbatim or basing new efforts on one.

If you think that git as it exists right now is at all comparable to Monotone or Codeville you're completely delusional.

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> > In case these concepts got conflated, I'd like to point out that Codeville
> > merge both supports renames *and* does better than three-way merge can do
> > at merging a single, non-renamed file.
>
> And I'd like to point out (again) that git doesn't actually care what
> merge strategy the user uses.
>
> Me _personally_, I want to have something that is very repeatable and
> non-clever. Something I understand _or_ tells me that it can't do it. And
> quite frankly, merging single-file history _without_ taking all the other
> files' history into account makes me go "ugh".

Now you've just gone off the deep end. This is an apples-to-apples comparison. Please accept one of thee following two statements:

(a) Git doesn't do merging, and none of the related new tools around it do merging.

(b) Codeville merge (sans rename functionality) would be superior for the merging which will be done.

-Bram