Re: on reputation and lines and putting things places (Re: gcc branches?)

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Tom Lord wrote:

>       Now, almost all of *my* merge difficulties have been because
>       Apple changes to GCC are logically contradictory to FSF code.
>       Does arch include an intelligent merging component that is
>       smart about C
>
> Ok, I'm stumped, perhaps because I don't know the details of what you
> are describing.  Why do you think a tool specifically knowledgable
> about C is needed here?
To take an example of something real-life, we have additional warning
flags not in FSF sources because of the collective spoon-gagging
response when they were suggested.  Now when Neil Booth reorganized
option flags into a c-opts.c (a good thing), I then had to go and
rewrite our local patches to fit this new scheme, deleting some code
(yay) and moving other bits into c-opts.c.  All of this was manual
work.

Sure, it's unreasonable to expect any CM system to somehow divine the
meaning of an arbitrary change, and then do an arbitrary rewrite of a
local patch to work with it, but that is what consumed the great
majority of my time when merging.  It may be more reasonable to
expect some class of patches to work - perhaps a local patch could be
made to follow the function it's patching, if the function is moved
to another file - but my real point is that at least for me, a change
of CM system would not have had much impact on the tasks that took
up the largest portion of my time.

Stan