-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, Aaron Bentley wrote: > >>>Btw, this is a pet peeve of mine, and it is not at all restricted to >>>the SCM world. >> >>I guess I don't mind a bit of high-mmv discussion, so long as it doesn't >>get in the way of real work. Polishing these kinds of things seems to >>fall in the category of 10% of functionality that takes 90% of effort. > > > Well, the thing is, that 10% of the functionality usually takes a whole > lot _less_ than 10% of the work. I guess this depends on whether you consider the brainstorming and discussion to be part of the work of polishing, and I do mean polishing. Getting from something that works 90% of the time to something that works 99% of the time can be a questionable expenditure of time and effort. > The same is actually true of SCM's too, I'm totally convinced. At least in > git, we really haven't spent _that_ much time on merges, for example. My > original stupid three-way merge was really simple, and I think the way I > introduced "stages" into the git index was really clever, but it was still > a small detail. And it worked surprisingly way. I did rewrite our merge code once, but that was because the API was quite hard to deal with and made it hard to maintain. I agree that it's important to focus effort on the areas that make a difference. On the other hand, our "exotic" text merge algorithms have been praised by the people who work on Launchpad. So that's a win. > As an example: I suspect that in git just the CVS importer has gotten > _way_ more attention than merging ever got. Importing from CVS is simply a > much harder problem in practice, and we've probably had more people > working on it (and that's _despite_ the fact that this is one of the areas > where git has successfully re-used other projects that had similar goals: > cvsps, cvs2svn etc). It's hard to "think" about, because a lot of the > problems with importing from CVS are literally all about the details and > the nasty crud. I really think "merging" is _way_ easier. Yes, I don't even want to think about CVS when I don't have to. Aaron -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFOS2Y0F+nu1YWqI0RAiOcAJ0TXmBdiCcvnTzmg+nnF+kayJ25cgCggMFx w6xFlFHwPoNm9dt/T4LnmCU= =zNuy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html