Why isn't the merge patch being merged?

[Johan Walles]

Hi!

Bug 120152 (include a "merge" option when dpkg finds modded conf
files) has nine duplicates and (at least) one patch.

What's stopping the patch from being merged?

Regards //Johan

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[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Johan Walles wrote:
> Bug 120152 (include a "merge" option when dpkg finds modded conf
> files) has nine duplicates and (at least) one patch.
>
> What's stopping the patch from being merged?

Lack of review mainly.

We have many patches lying in the BTS but many of them are old and
probably don't apply anymore and need to be refreshed and discussed.

Maybe this one is different, but then it's one out of many and until
someone does the work to apply it, test it, it will continue lying
here.

The dpkg team is quite small compared to the task represented by the
hundreds of bug reports. So the time of the main committers is limited and
they can't review all bugs.

Help is always welcome.

Cheers,
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Raphaël Hertzog

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[Johan Walles]

Thanks for the quick reply!

2007/10/23, Raphael Hertzog <her...@debian.org>:

> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Johan Walles wrote:
> > Bug 120152 (include a "merge" option when dpkg finds modded conf
> > files) has nine duplicates and (at least) one patch.
> >
> > What's stopping the patch from being merged?
>
> Lack of review mainly.
>
> We have many patches lying in the BTS but many of them are old and
> probably don't apply anymore and need to be refreshed and discussed.

This one seems actively maintained; for a couple of years now the
author has been packaging his own patched dpkg (currently at 1.14.5):

http://elonen.iki.fi/code/unofficial-debs/dpkg-merge/

Regards //Johan

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Johan Walles wrote:
> > We have many patches lying in the BTS but many of them are old and
> > probably don't apply anymore and need to be refreshed and discussed.
>
> This one seems actively maintained; for a couple of years now the
> author has been packaging his own patched dpkg (currently at 1.14.5):
>
> http://elonen.iki.fi/code/unofficial-debs/dpkg-merge/

I saw this somewhat later on, after I finished my reply. Except for a file
rename (man/C/dpkg.1 -> man/dpkg.1), the patch applied fine to the current
version.

On the other hand, it might be that a 2-way merge is not what we're
looking for. It's certainly better than nothing but OTOH it would be 2
times better if we could have 3-way merge so that we can even add a new
option --force-confmerge that tries automatically a 3-way merge and that
falls back to the usual behaviour --force-conf{new,old,def} if the merge
process failed.

But it requires more extensive changes as we need to keep a copy of the
conffiles as shippped by the previous version of the package.

Jarno, would you be interested to work on that?

Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog

Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
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[Jarno Elonen]

> On the other hand, it might be that a 2-way merge is not what we're
> looking for. It's certainly better than nothing but OTOH it would be 2
> times better if we could have 3-way merge so that we can even add a new
> option --force-confmerge that tries automatically a 3-way merge and that
> falls back to the usual behaviour --force-conf{new,old,def} if the merge
> process failed.

The 3-way merging will have to be manually cheked anyway, as it has
quite realistic potential for creating broken configurations (when
things have been moved around inside the conffile.)

> But it requires more extensive changes as we need to keep a copy of the
> conffiles as shippped by the previous version of the package.
>
> Jarno, would you be interested to work on that?

I might be interested in writing a nice UI tool for it, like I did for the
two-way merge (imediff2), but since I'm not a Debian developer anymore and
have already had tough time with getting this patch accepted, for example,
I will not negotiate the conffile storage scheme on the developer lists.

- Jarno

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007, Johan Walles wrote:
> Raphael, since you say that Jarno's current patch applies fine to the
> current version of dpkg, would it be possible for you to merge it?

No, I'm not ready yet to work on the C part of dpkg. I'd rather someone
else reviews it and merge it. Ian or Guillem probably.

[Johan Walles]

Raphael, since you say that Jarno's current patch applies fine to the
current version of dpkg, would it be possible for you to merge it?

While waiting for somebody to implement a three way merge, I'd much
prefer a two way merge (Jarno's patch) to nothing (which is what we
have now).

Please merge the patch?

Regards //Johan

2007/10/24, Raphael Hertzog <her...@debian.org>: