Merge or Cherry-Pick?

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 12:29:12AM +0100, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Monday, 31 de January de 2011 23:50:49 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 11:27:15PM +0100, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > Commit to 4.6, merge 4.6 into master.
> > 
> > that's hard enough in qt, and there is totally no way that kde's
> > discipline would be sufficient to make forward-merging feasible (as in
> > "actually helpful and producing an even remotely readable history").
> 
> Only because in Qt we do it in batches, so we get lots of changes. And
> the Qt repository is way bigger than anything KDE has.
> 
that's part of the problem, but not what i aimed at. people are just too
short-minded and often too lazy (and sometimes don't have the disk space
or cpu/time) to do things in the proper branch to start with. the result
is a lot of cherry-picks even when using forward merging, which makes
for a rather terrible history and a somewhat limited benefit. just look
at qt's history - kde's will be three times worse.

just face it, git's merging concept makes most sense for longer-lived
feature branches, but not so much for bugfix branches. not even linux
itself uses a forward-merge strategy for bugfix branches.