Re: How to deal with deletes between imports (suggestion)

For those still interested in this rather long thread...

We've been actively discussing with Andrey the current matter
of states (in Russian), and he asked about my opinion of what
should we do in the current situation, should we revert the
deltas to Xlist files, should we remove the files on vendor
branches, if/when this should happen, etc.

I suggested that we leave things as they are now (at least for
Groff and Texinfo that I maintain where I'm quite happy), except
for reverting the Xlist delta, but only for Groff.  He wondered
why we should behave different.

I thought I'd (once again) share my thoughts on the subject.

Amongst contributed things that I maintain, I can differentiate
two basic approaches.

With the first approach, the imports are done maximally cutted
(Xlist is large), importing only those things that FreeBSD needs.
After the next import, things that are no longer imported get
removed on the vendor branch, by maintainers who care to do that.
(I wish "cvs import" did this automatically.)

With the second approach, the import is done minimally cutted
(Xlist is kept minimal), importing almost everything, but unneeded
stuff is still removed on the HEAD (FreeBSD) branch.

There are good and bad sides with both approaches.

The first approach is good because it saves space under /home/ncvs,
especially for such large "space eaters" like GCC.

The second approach is good because you can check out sources on the
vendor branch, type ./configure, and build it the "vendor" way.
It's beneficial in situations where you should periodically update
config.h, etc., and is not easily possible with the first approach
(of course there is still the possibility).

In any case, my preferences for handling the vendor branch (except
for obvious things like not committing local stuff there) can be
summarized by this rule:

- Checkout on the vendor branch (e.g, "cvs co -rFSF") should
  produce the same output as checkout of the last vendor release
  (e.g., "cvs co -rvX_Y"), with a few exceptions like partial
  upgrades (e.g., mdoc(7) for Groff) and partial hot security and
  bug fixes.  Whenever possible, new imports should be done
  instead, even for anoncvs snapshots.

From this it follows that:

- Unneeded files should either be not imported (and deleted on
  the vendor branch after _not_ importing), or should be
  deleted on the HEAD (FreeBSD) branch.

Both approaches have their application.  For example, I prefer
the first approach for Groff (hence, I'd like to revert the
Xlist delta), and the second approach for things like GNU grep
and Texinfo (if I were doing the initial import of Texinfo I'd
probably do it using the first approach though).


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov
FreeBSD committer
ru_at_FreeBSD.org