Re: messy bash.git history

[Eric Blake]

On 02/06/2015 02:13 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> Chet,
> 
> I've noticed that your 'devel' branch in bash.git is rather messy;
> basically lots of commits that snapshot the state of a directory, then a
> followup commit that removes leftovers and stray files.  If you were to
> set your .gitignore file (to make your exclusion list public) or your
> .git/info/exclude file (to keep your exclusion list local to your
> repository) to the file names that you normally clean up (such as *~,
> *.old, *.save, *.orig; one per line), then your imports wouldn't create
> those files in the first place, you wouldn't have to do cleanup commits,
> and it would be easier to follow the history to see what really changed
> without being inundated by all the noise on the side file
> creation-deletion loops.

Some more cleanups that you may want to consider:

You have a couple of generated Makefiles checked into bash.git as
symlinks (and not always pointing to the same location), where building
locally on my end recreates the file as a regular file and gives me
grief every time I want to commit something locally.  Since they are
generated differently based on my choice of ./configure options, they
should not be in .git (generated files in git only make sense if they
can be regenerated byte-for-byte by someone else with relatively
easy-to-obtain tools; it can be argued that including ./configure is
okay if it was generated from a well-publicized version of Autoconf; but
it is very hard to argue that generated Makefile would ever meet that
criteria).

Doing 'git status' after an in-tree build of the devel branch shows lots
of generated files that could reasonably be added to .gitignore (I've
already manually excluded '*.[ao]', 'Makefile', and 'autom4te.cache/' in
addition to this list):

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

        typechange: doc/Makefile
        typechange: examples/loadables/perl/Makefile

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

        .build
        .made
        bash
        bashbug
        bashversion
        builtins/builtext.h
        builtins/builtins.c
        builtins/mkbuiltins
        builtins/pipesize.h
        builtins/psize.aux
        config.h
        config.log
        config.status
        lsignames.h
        mksignames
        mksyntax
        pathnames.h
        po/Makefile.in
        po/POTFILES
        signames.h
        stamp-h
        syntax.c
        version.h
        y.tab.c
        y.tab.h


-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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