[arch-haskell] Building the Haskell ABS tree

[gdweber at iue.edu]

On 2012-Jun-25, Magnus Therning wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:29:26PM -0400, gdweber at iue.edu wrote:
> > Thanks for this advice and also Magnus's.
> > 
> > I've made some progress, and have made a pull request to
> > archhaskell/habs -- my first contribution to the project!
> > 
> > But since then I've pulled from archhaskell/habs and have conflicts
> > in cblrepo.db.  What is the best thing to do here -- should I try to
> > resolve the conflicts on my end (and make another pull request?) or
> > will Magnus resolve the conflicts (assuming he accepts my pull
> > request) and I fetch them later?
> 
> It's always best to make sure your changes are rebased onto
> habs/master, that makes it trivial to pull them.

Always, or usually?

I think I understand how this would usually be helpful,
but not always, and not in the current case.  
My understanding of "rebase" is not as clear as I would like,
but it seems to me that the two main uses are 
(1) to collapse a series of commits into a single commit, and
(2) to convert a series of committed snapshots, beginning at A
and culminating in C,
into a series of patches (differences), 
move backward (or maybe forward) to some other commit B in the history, 
and "replay" or apply the patches
from there, resulting in a new snapshot C' which
can then be easily merged in to succeed B.

(1) does not apply in this case, because I made only a single commit.

(2) could have been helpful if commits were made in habs/master
(meaning, I think, archhaskell/habs master) between the time of my fork
and the time of my pull request, but if I read the network graph
correctly, the commits in archhaskell/habs were made after my pull
request.  Consequently, if I had done a rebase at the time, C' would have
been identical with C.

Do I understand this correctly?

> 
> > Also, I've noticed that most pull requests are from master to
> > master.  Is this the best way, or is it preferred to make a branch
> > for any set of packages that we want to contribute?
> 
> Personally I think this stems from peoples' inexperience with git.
> It's definitely preferred to make a separate branch for your changes
> and create a pull request from it.  Then use the master branch only to
> track habs/master.

Yes, I also began to think this as I continued reading about git
in the meantime.  Coming from darcs to git, it was a surprise to
learn that my repo, forked and cloned from archhaskell/habs,
was not already a "separate branch".

I will follow the practice of making a topic branch in the future.

In fact, I think I'll just start over and do it right.
I'll lose some work, but not much.

> 
> /M
> 
> -- 
> Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 
> email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
> twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus
> 
> Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with
> millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural
> integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
>      -- Alan Kay



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-- 
Gregory D. Weber, Ph. D.                            :
Associate Professor of Informatics                 / \
Indiana University East                           0   :
Tel. (765) 973-8420; FAX (765) 973-8550              / \
http://mypage.iu.edu/~gdweber/                      1  []