Your occasional reminder that autoconf and mercurial suck....

[Jerry James]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> 1.  We could tell the commit bot not to diff merges.

I'm not interested in seeing diffs of generated files, such as
configure.  But I would like to see diffs of other merged files.

> 2.  We could make a policy of rebasing branches which are not
>    otherwise public.  (That would jolly well suck in Mercurial, but
>    so do 20 line patches generating absurdly large diffs.)

I don't really know what this would entail.

> 3.  We could hg remove configure which would halve the spew in this
>    case.

There are good and bad points to doing this.  On the good side, not
having generated files under version control means that we have a
variety of developers testing that the file are properly generated on
a variety of setups.  It also avoids the situation that prompted you
to send this email.  On the bad side, now we don't have canonical
versions of the generated files.  I presume we would anoint our
release manager with the power to generate the Blessed Versions of
those files for releases.

> Note that I haven't mentioned option 4 but I'm definitely thinking it!

I think I git what you're driving at.

> Or we could do some combination of 1 .. 3.
>
> WDOT?

I think we should start with 3 and see (a) how much that reduces the
merge pain and (b) what new pain it inflicts on us.
-- 
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/