[Scummvm-devel] Towards a new release branch model

[Tarek Soliman]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 09:31:27PM +0200, Michael Madsen wrote:
> 1) What is the concrete advantage of either of these approaches? No Git terms; explain exactly what they let us do and why *we* would want to do that.
One advantage I see with doing things the proper way would be not having multiple commits that are the same thing.

> 2) What, specifically, is the problem with the current approach?

- Multiple copies of a commit (even worse with multiple related commits)
- Having an extra step to do to "port" changes


About using git terms and saying stuff is bad because "it is the svn way":
This is really a way of thinking that came from what we had to work with (svn)
When I say "this stinks of svn" I don't mean svn is inherently evil or immoral. I am saying the svn way is a workaround that was the best one could do given the crappy tool.
Applying these workarounds to something that doesn't need them is usually because of tradition and doesn't make any sense technically.

I understand that people generally don't like change and that change is frustrating.
Most people just want to do actual work and not learn about the tools they use or learn just enough to do what they need to do.

A lot of the advantages in using git vs using svn are proving hard for me to explain because you're explaining them to a svn crowd.
Telling them "merging is faster" for example is easy for them to imagine but they won't even realize that because merging is faster it encourages making throwaway branches for "experimenting with ideas"
Making a private branch so you can test out an idea doesn't even occur to someone using svn because in svn "who would ever do that?!"
-- 
Tarek