openstack team mailing list archive

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2012-05-11 at 13:57 -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-05-11 at 12:37 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> >   - Our history is far from "clean history", it's pretty disgusting 
> >     really. The ratio of interesting commits to merge commits is 
> >     roughly 3:2, which is pretty cluttered. With the kernel, it's more 
> >     like 15:1
> 
> Would a policy of 'non-rebasing branches have to be linear' be too
> onerous ? I've never met a merge commit I really liked; it would require
> committers to rebase before pushing, but it makes the history much more
> useful.

I'm guessing we could easily flick a switch in gerrit to cause it to
rebase instead of merge.

I don't remember any debate about it, but I'm also guessing there aren't
any hugely strong opinions in OpenStack about which is better.

The thing we'd lose is the context of which parent commit a patch was
written against. If I was to go by some of Linus's rants I'd think this
was a cardinal sin ("NEVER destroy other people's history") yet kernel
folks do this all the time by emailing around patches.

On balance, I think I'd prefer if we did switch over to rebasing.

Cheers,
Mark.