[Unison-hackers] a common patch set - first attempt [repost]

[Andrew Schulman]

Benjamin, Max, and Jérôme, I'd appreciate hearing your comments on this.  
Send them to me privately if you prefer.  Thanks, Andrew.

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Subject: a common patch set - first attempt
From: Andrew Schulman <andrex at comcast.net>
Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 22:21:11 -0400
Newsgroup: gmane.network.unison.devel

I've put together a first attempt at a standard set of patches for 
Unison versions 2.9.1, 2.9.20, 2.10.2, and 2.12.0.  The draft page is 
at http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/unison/patches.html.  Please have a 
look at the page, and send me your comments.

The patches listed on the page reflect the recent discussions on 
unison-hackers and unison-users, as well as I've been able to follow 
them, up through today.  The discussion was long and there are a lot of 
patches, so it's likely that I've gotten some details wrong or missed 
some things.  Please check the patches and let me know if you find any 
problems.

Notes on specific patches:  The OSX client patch 
(http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/unison-hackers/2005-May/000071.html) 
conflicts with Jérôme's later file properties patch 
(http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/unison-hackers/2005-May/000090.html).  
I'm using only the later one, on the assumption that Jérôme revised and 
rereleased it.  Also I named one patch "osx-unknown" because its purpose 
was never stated.

The goal of the page is to provide a standard set of patches that all of 
us who are developing and packaging Unison can agree to.  The current 
system of posting and pulling patches on unison-users and 
unison-hackers leads to hit-or-miss patching, as the recent discussion 
has shown.  I think it would make more sense to have a single place to 
keep them all.  Developers can call new patches to my attention, and 
I'll add them to the list.  Packagers can agree to keep their packages 
up-to-date with the list, in order to improve reliability and 
cross-platform consistency of their packages.  I hope that packagers 
from more platforms will sign on to keep current with the list, too.

I've jumped the gun on the page by saying that "The patches listed here 
represent the consensus of the Unison developers and the packagers for 
Cygwin, OpenBSD, and Windows."  This isn't true yet, but I would like 
for it to be.  So in particular, Benjamin, Jerome, Max, and Zvezdan, 
I'd like to have each of you review the list of patches, and let me 
know if you can agree to it.  If you can't, then please tell us what 
your issues are and let's try to address them.

I'm sure this isn't the greatest method of keeping a patch list.  
Whenever a new patch becomes available, someone will have to call it my 
attention if I miss it (I follow the mailing lists, but miss things 
sometimes), then I'll have to manually update the page and notify all 
of the packagers.  No doubt there's a better way, and if someone can 
tell or show me what that is, please do.  Also, I don't think it will 
be too much work to maintain the list, but if it is I may have to back 
off of it.  All in all it would be better to have some kind of 
collaborative approach.  But for now, I'm willing to give it a try, and 
I hope this approach will be an improvement over the current method.

If this whole approach is wrong and there's a better/smarter way (CVS 
archives of patched previous releases?), then please tell me about 
that, too.  I won't mind; on the contrary, I don't want to waste my 
effort on an approach that isn't going to be useful to all of us.

Andrew.

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