[Development] Android: Merge or no merge?

[Stephen Kelly]

On Thursday, February 21, 2013 14:50:26 Eskil Abrahamsen Blomfeldt wrote:
> As far as I can gather from the attention this discussion is getting,
> having the code drop with amendments in the Android-specific parts of
> the code is not unacceptable to anyone but you, while having the history
> intact and work load focused is viewed as valuable by the people who are
> working on this.

As a data point, I fully agree with everything ossi wrote. 

I didn't speak up before because I have already given up on several aspects of 
'doing things right' in the QtProject. It's just too easy to do things 
wrong/lazily and then claim it is too late to fix (then repeat the next time 
lazy is faster than right). Why would you listen to me? What difference could 
it make? I can't block a merge. You already demonstrated your greater 
permissions on the repo when you direct-pushed the initial android commit. 
That surprised me greatly.

Having useful and relevant history is important. Having messy history, which 
does nothing but preserve mistakes people made, style fixes and reverts (which 
are ordinarily caught at review-time) is not useful. Large commits where the 
the commit message is useless and the commit so large that nothing of 
relevance can be seen is also not useful or important history.

I tried browsing the branch with gitk --first-parent, and noticed commit 
ae468e5cadc18189ba6d5e6716a1f3e37e118a7a 'Merge branch 'wip/android' into 
dev', but it doesn't appear to be on the dev branch. After that --first-parent 
is showing the wrong stuff. Any idea what's going on there? Was it a merge 
that you did locally into dev and then pushed as the new android branch? I 
notice this repeats in all other merges, which breaks --first-parent very 
effectively.

The commit f42766c12b66450d6afe95e1256ec514fbeb28dc 'Compile fix when 
QT_NO_PRINTDIALOG is defined' obviously belongs on the stable branch, not the 
android branch.

The commit 63ac2d3c32750c498fb10de8803f553c58d1e710 'Export 
QAbstractFileEngine[XXXX] classes.' is quite surprising and also belongs on 
the dev branch, not on the android branch.

I also had a quick look at the commit 7f4a5e98ab6d146d46e4c40d17de9c725bb7bcef 
'Say hello to Android.' Adding the 'assets' url scheme handling is deserving 
of a commit on its own at least (in dev). 

I have no idea how much of the branch made sense in necessitas/the branch, but 
was obsolete by the time of the merge 
(like https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,46802 ). 

I can imagine that many of us who try to make use of repo history in the 
future will end up on that branch, and it won't be much fun, but we won't be 
able to do anything about it.

It disapponts me that we'll have such a crap ball of history so recently in 
the repo if you merge as planned, but I don't feel that I can stop it. If ossi 
can and has the patience to try to explain the importance of good history, 
then more power to him :).

Thanks,

-- 
Stephen Kelly <stephen.kelly at kdab.com> | Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
www.kdab.com || Germany +49-30-521325470 || Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
KDAB - Qt Experts - Platform-Independent Software Solutions
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