[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner: merging v. rebasing

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

The time has come to get code into the master branch for porting KGoldrunner
to QGraphicsView and KGameRenderer.  This work was done as part of GSoC,
by Roney Gomes with me as mentor.

It started as a branch in SVN on May 26, rev 1296695, nearly 5 months ago,
and has received dozens of commits, including at least 4 new files and the
deletion of 6 obsolete files, i.e. hundreds/thousands of lines changed.

The trunk/master branch has been fairly quiet in the meantime, except for lots of
scripty entries and a few to do with new KDE Games libraries and the move to GIT.

Also on 25 June, the KDE 4.9 branch, rev 1303042, was created.

I have been reading Chapter 3 of the GIT book, http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching
about branching, merging and rebasing and am wondering whether to merge or
rebase the "qgv" branch of KGoldrunner.

It seems that merging will create a gigantic patch with an unclear history and
rebasing will create a linear history which would be more like the history as
I think of it, most of it being work by Roney or me, with a few insertions from
trunk or master.

However there are these dire warnings in the book about what can happen if you
rebase on a public repository, see:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Rebasing#The-Perils-of-Rebasing

I am not terribly worried about other workers on KGoldrunner.  Roney's work
finished some time ago and I am the main contributor now.  However I am
concerned about how a rebase might affect the KDE 4.9 branch.

So what should I do?  Merge or rebase?

And in any case, how do I go about it?  Should I:

- Commit and push my final change to "qgv"
- Pull "master"
- Switch to "master" (locally)
- Merge or rebase "qgv"
- Push "master"
?

What happens to "qgv" locally?  What happens to "qgv" on the central repository?
I have no particular desire to preserve "qgv" forever.  OTOH I think the history
*should* include a record of Roney's work.

Advice welcomed …    I have not seen any web pages with an example this big.

Cheers, Ian W.