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SubjectRe: The history of the Linux OS
Date
Riley Williams <rhw@bigfoot.com> asks:
: > So I'll make a little tool, maybe we can call the "linustool",
: > which lets him hack on the diffs and then applies them for him. But
: > what it really does is save away a copy of the diffs, get the
: > (possibly hacked) diffs from Linux when he says "apply", diff the
: > diffs, if they are changed, apply the first set as your changes,
: > and then apply the mods to that set as his change. It sounds
: > complicated and I'm sure it will be a little dicey, but I'm also
: > sure I can build that tool.
:
: Maybe I'm just super-dense or something, but...
:
: Q. Why is a tool like that needed? Surely one can simply produce a
: copy of the tree as it exists after one's own diff is applied,
: and a separate copy of the tree as released by Linus, and just
: diff one against the other? It's not exactly hard...

I must have done a crappy job explaining things because what you described
is exactly what won't work. If Linus has changed the patch you sent in,
then your diff will not show the files to be the same. Sure, it's true
that you can parse the diffs yourself and figure out that some of your
stuff got in - but the key point is that you, a human being, have to do
work.

I'm sure you are imaging that Linus will just changea thing or two and
it just isn't that big of a deal. But that isn't necessarily the case -
consider what happens if you submit a patch that changes a file that
other patches change as well. Your diff approach starts to get harder
and you - the human - have to do the extra work.

In the model that BitKeeper uses, you don't have to do any work - you
can detect in a program - without any chance whatsoever of getting an
incorrect result - if your changes have gone in or not. Regardless of
how many other patches went in to the same file, or the same line of the
same file, etc., etc.

Think about the complaints of the some of the developers who have had to
submit their patches over and over before Linus had time to apply them.
With BitKeeper, that patch process can become automatic - each time a new
release comes out, you run a tool over your tree and it checks against
the new release and resubmits the patch if it isn't in the new release.

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