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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jerry James writes:
 > 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.

That's a good point.  We could enumerate the generated files that are
under version control (I think they are configure and src/depends).  I
think I actually thought of that then forgot it....  Thanks for
remembering it.

 > But I would like to see diffs of other merged files.

The problem is that almost all the diffs are redundant.

 > > 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.

The easy way: keep a pristine copy, and always pull from upstream
before pushing to it.

The harder way: sometimes you end up with a merge anyway, because
somebody snuck in a commit upstream or you forgot or whatever.  Then
you install the transplant extension, and cherrypick the relevant
patch from you sandbox to the pristine mirror, then push.

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

Well, we don't actually have canonical versions, anyway, since
developers are pretty regularly futzing with them.  At least I know I
do autoconf for random reasons every so often.