Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/24] pack-objects: multi-pack verbatim reuse

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2023 09:49:40 +0100

On Fri, Dec 01, 2023 at 03:02:22PM -0500, Taylor Blau wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 01, 2023 at 09:31:14AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
[snip]
> I suppose if we're relatively confident that the last series will be
> merged eventually, then that seems like less of a concern. But I'm not
> sure that we're at that point yet.

That's an additional valid concern indeed.

[snip]
> > >   - The fourth series (which actually implements multi-pack reuse) still
> > >     remains the most complicated, and would likely be the most difficult
> > >     to review. So I think you'd still have one difficult series to
> > >     review, plus four other series which are slightly less difficult to
> > >     review ;-).
> >
> > That's fine in my opinion, there's no surprise here that a complicated
> > topic is demanding for both the author and the reviewer.
> 
> My preference is to avoid splitting the series if we can help it. But if
> you feel strongly, or others feel similarly, I'm happy to take another
> crack at breaking it up. Thanks for all of your review so far!

I don't feel strongly about this at all, I've only tried to spell out my
own thoughts in this context as I thought they were kind of relevant
here. I've thought quite a lot about this topic recently due to my work
on the reftable backend, where I'm trying to get as many pieces as
possible landed individually before landing the actual backend itself.
It's working well for most of the part, but in other contexts it's a bit
weird that we try to cater towards something that doesn't exist yet. But
naturally, the reftable work is of different nature than the topic you
work on here and thus my own takeaways may likely not apply heer.

To summarize, I think there is merit in splitting up patches into chunks
that make it in individually and thus gradually work toward a topic, but
I also totally understand why you (or Junio as the maintainer) might
think that this is not a good idea. The ultimate decision for how to
handle topics should be with the patch series' author and maintainer.

Patrick