[Development] [IMPORTANT] your commits in stable branch perhaps lost after dev branch merged

[Olivier Goffart]

On Thursday 21 March 2013 16:12:51 Qi Liang wrote:
> > Let's be more clear: no commits were lost. They are all still present.
> > 
> > However, due to conflicts, some changes may have been improperly resolved.
> > This is no different than any other merge, in any direction.
> 
> Yes, it's "lost" because of conflict resolve. And we recorded the conflicts
> information in merge commit, that's better than before, the merge commits
> in Qt 4.
> > When there's a conflict the merger does not know how to resolve, the
> > merger
> > asks for help. Choosing unconditionally one side is a bad idea.
> 
> I don't think the merger has enough time to do that. 

He has too take that time.

It is the responsability of the merger to do proper work.

Merging is not an easy task. (I know it, I was doing the merge during Qt 4.x 
times)
It is easy for someone unexperimented to mess up.

Which is why I think only experimented developer should do the merge.


> And under open
> governance & gerrit, there is a risk for merge, maybe some incoming commits
> will break the merge.
> > It's not the first dev-stable merge. The direction does not matter. This
> > merge is no different than the previous ones.
> 
> Had we done any merge from Qt 4.x to 4.x-1 or similar before? Before, we
> think stable as 5.0 and dev as 5.1, then we prefer bug fixes in stable,
> features in dev.

A merge is between two branches.   And the merge operation is commutative.
Think about it like:
   merge(stable , dev) == merge (dev, stable)


// usually
tmp = merge(stable, dev);
dev = tmp;

// this time
tmp = merge(stable, dev);
stable = tmp;


The merge operation is the same.  The main difference is that this time the 
merger apparently screw up.
 
> But now, I don't think stable and dev are much different in current release
> cycle, just a time difference, all changes in dev will be in stable after
> this "BIG" merge procedure, just means the users of stable branch will get
> the fixes in a short time or a few months later.

The merge was no bigger than usual.

-- 
Olivier 

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