[FFmpeg-devel] Confusing git merges

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2011-03-19 at 20:32 +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I know alot of people have been confused seeing changes and then seeing them
> reverted, or seeing changes on the ML that arent in the merged version
> 
> I really hate it as well, but this is how 'git pull' works
> Unless we modify git or at least the mailing list hook these things will
> keep showing up.
> 
> when theres a merge, the hook posts all changes of the merged branch no matter
> if they are in the actual result or not.
> 
> i cant really do anything about it, except hacking the ML hook to filter it
> out

If I understand the problem correctly, I think the generally accepted
way to avoid it is: "Don't commit stuff and then revert it, in a tree
that you're then going to offer for upstream merging".

So if you are working on something and you spent a day going down a
rathole, and later revert it, you can rewrite your history to look
"clean", *before* requesting that it be merged into the upstream tree.

Obviously there are issues with rewriting history after it's been made
public, but if it's in a "topic tree" which contains the development for
just one feature, and if nobody else is going development *based* on
that tree, it's normally not so bad.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation