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Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, Aaron Bentley wrote:
quoted
quoted
Btw, this is a pet peeve of mine, and it is not at all restricted to
the SCM world.
I guess I don't mind a bit of high-mmv discussion, so long as it doesn't
get in the way of real work. Polishing these kinds of things seems to
fall in the category of 10% of functionality that takes 90% of effort.
Well, the thing is, that 10% of the functionality usually takes a whole
lot _less_ than 10% of the work.
I guess this depends on whether you consider the brainstorming and
discussion to be part of the work of polishing, and I do mean polishing.
Getting from something that works 90% of the time to something that
works 99% of the time can be a questionable expenditure of time and effort.
The same is actually true of SCM's too, I'm totally convinced. At least in
git, we really haven't spent _that_ much time on merges, for example. My
original stupid three-way merge was really simple, and I think the way I
introduced "stages" into the git index was really clever, but it was still
a small detail. And it worked surprisingly way.
I did rewrite our merge code once, but that was because the API was
quite hard to deal with and made it hard to maintain. I agree that it's
important to focus effort on the areas that make a difference.
On the other hand, our "exotic" text merge algorithms have been praised
by the people who work on Launchpad. So that's a win.
As an example: I suspect that in git just the CVS importer has gotten
_way_ more attention than merging ever got. Importing from CVS is simply a
much harder problem in practice, and we've probably had more people
working on it (and that's _despite_ the fact that this is one of the areas
where git has successfully re-used other projects that had similar goals:
cvsps, cvs2svn etc). It's hard to "think" about, because a lot of the
problems with importing from CVS are literally all about the details and
the nasty crud. I really think "merging" is _way_ easier.
Yes, I don't even want to think about CVS when I don't have to.
Aaron
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