kde-qt branches after 4.6.0 release

[Parker Coates]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:03, David Faure wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 December 2009, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
>> >  - due to the way that the master and 4.6-stable-patched branches are
>> > created (with Git merges), it will be extremely hard for packagers to
>> > extract patches from them. KDE developers didn't like the solution I
>> > created that would accommodate everyone (the 4.5.x-patched branches), so
>> > to make the developers' lives easier, we're making the packagers' lives
>> > absolute nightmare. I'm not available for help, don't bother asking on
>> > IRC.
>>
>> I must intonate a 'mea culpa' here because I was the one who proposed
>> the current kde-qt.git branch model (
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.core/61168 ). I did not
>> know it would make extracting the patches nearly impossible, and it
>> was not said at any point in the thread (or at least I cannot find
>> anything other than the "OK, we can do that" in
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.core/61172 )
>
> Yeah I think Thiago is pretty unfair here.
> We can't be blamed for asking for convenience if we didn't know it would have
> bad consequences on packagers. Besides I don't see what's hard about
> extracting patches. Or why packagers would want to take most unofficial patches
> anyway.

Well to be fair, Thiago's been dealing with a lot of questions and
complaints about kde-qt lately. I imagine it's getting to be a bit of
headache for him. We also keep changing our minds about what we want
kde-qt to be.

Some (like myself) just want something that always points to the
latest version of Qt recommended for KDE development. We don't really
care about an accurate history, the ability to make merge requests or
the handling of KDE specifc patches. Others just want a place to store
and organise the KDE specific patches. Others seem to want kde-qt to
serve as a way to work with Qt while keeping the KDE patches. I think
the people in the second and third categories are probably more git
knowledgeable, while many of those in the first category are not.

As each group got more vocal, Thiago had to change the meaning of
different branches in kde-qt. I can understand if he's frustrated.

Maybe we need a brand new repository call qt-for-kde-dummies with only
a single master branch. This would be the latest recommended Qt with
the latest recommended patches, but no guarantee of a clean history,
patch extractability, etc. I, for one, know I would use it.

Parker