Re: [RFA] convert blocks to dictionaries, phase 1, main part

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 10:43:42AM -0700, David Carlton wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 10:35:53 -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com> said:
> 
> > I think that you should take Andrew's suggestion, though - create a
> > branch to finish this work on.  It's a bit of a hassle, since you'll
> > need to do periodic merges to the branch, but I don't feel right
> > adding something with this many temporary interfaces and FIXMEs to
> > the trunk.  Then you can commit patches on the branch without
> > approval, and get it into a stabler state.
> 
> Sure, if that's what you want.  Is it okay to put up an RFA after I've
> switched over just blocks, or do you want me to wait until after I've
> switched over global symbols as well?
> 
> Obviously my attempt to make patches smaller by introducing temporary
> interfaces wasn't a smashing success.  Ah well; I'll know better next
> time...

Basically, at any point when you don't have a lot of temporary gunk.  I
confess, I'm of two minds about working on a branch for this sort of thing:
I consider it very impractical for things which don't break up into
pieces easily afterwards.  GCC has been using an interesting approach,
which I think we could adapt and extend here.

How about a branch which require approval just like the mainline for
large patches, although giving David a little more freedom to play
around.  Then, we'd allow large merges from the branch back to the
trunk when they were ready and tested - larger patches than we'd
normally accept all at once, because they'd already been approved.

Andrew - thoughts?  Does it have any interesting possibilities?

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer