Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Example Cogito Addon - cogito-bundle

From: Aaron Bentley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:12:08 -0400

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> 
>>>Btw, this is a pet peeve of mine, and it is not at all restricted to 
>>>the SCM world.
>>
>>I guess I don't mind a bit of high-mmv discussion, so long as it doesn't
>>get in the way of real work.  Polishing these kinds of things seems to
>>fall in the category of 10% of functionality that takes 90% of effort.
> 
> 
> Well, the thing is, that 10% of the functionality usually takes a whole 
> lot _less_ than 10% of the work.

I guess this depends on whether you consider the brainstorming and
discussion to be part of the work of polishing, and I do mean polishing.
 Getting from something that works 90% of the time to something that
works 99% of the time can be a questionable expenditure of time and effort.

> The same is actually true of SCM's too, I'm totally convinced. At least in 
> git, we really haven't spent _that_ much time on merges, for example. My 
> original stupid three-way merge was really simple, and I think the way I 
> introduced "stages" into the git index was really clever, but it was still 
> a small detail. And it worked surprisingly way.

I did rewrite our merge code once, but that was because the API was
quite hard to deal with and made it hard to maintain.  I agree that it's
important to focus effort on the areas that make a difference.

On the other hand, our "exotic" text merge algorithms have been praised
by the people who work on Launchpad.  So that's a win.

> As an example: I suspect that in git just the CVS importer has gotten 
> _way_ more attention than merging ever got. Importing from CVS is simply a 
> much harder problem in practice, and we've probably had more people 
> working on it (and that's _despite_ the fact that this is one of the areas 
> where git has successfully re-used other projects that had similar goals: 
> cvsps, cvs2svn etc). It's hard to "think" about, because a lot of the 
> problems with importing from CVS are literally all about the details and 
> the nasty crud. I really think "merging" is _way_ easier.

Yes, I don't even want to think about CVS when I don't have to.

Aaron