[csw-maintainers] gar suggestion

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Mon Jun 28 18:14:53 -0400 2010:

> while you're busy disabling things... It would be nice if you
> disabled automatic "git-ification(?)", unless the person
> specifically says "I am interested in generating a patch set".  Most
> of the time, its just an annoying waste of time.

Sebastian and I discussed this too but I decided against it.  Here's
the reason: If you don't do the initial git snapshots at extract and
then patch time, you don't have a repo to work from.

It _is_ possible to simply go in and snapshot it after the fact, but
that's not useful in the 'makepatch' sense.  You typically want to:

1. find out $foo doesn't build.
2. hack the source until it does.
3. capture the changes that 'made it go.'

If you don't have the git repo setup ahead of time, this workflow
suffers.

So, while it's easy to add a knob for this, it makes it annoying to
subsequently have to re-'download', re-extract, etc in order to turn
it on when it is needed.  The re-extract step would blow away your
changes too, so you'd need a way to maintain your own manual diff
stuff.

Personally, I'm finding that for small projects, the git-ification
isn't overly burdensome, while for larger projects, it's a small price
(time-wise) in comparison to the extract step...

> really want it.  (I'm envisioning a per-directory make target.  ie:
> "gmake git" or something)

I'm willing to change it as makes the most people happy with it...that
being said, much of the current benefit of the way it's setup is due
to the multi-step integration (extract, patch).  Adding a toggle will
make it worse, imo.

Anyone else have a preference one way or another?

Thanks
-Ben
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302