Re: comparing code on different branches

[Yann Hodique]

>>>>> "Etienne" == Etienne Prud’homme <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>> I wish someone would write a package comparable to Magit that
>> we could get legal papers for and include it in Emacs.

> Although I really like Magit, I’m all for it. Could we make an official
> project with GNU Emacs contributors?

> I could try to contribute to some parts of it.

> Writing it alone would be insane (I need to eat).  I see that there’s
> more than 8k commits on their repository.  Also worth noting the project
> had 200 contributors.  I seriously wonder if hunting down for them would
> be easier than writing it from scratch!

As a former Magit maintainer myself, I would really hate to see much
effort going into rewriting it instead of improving it :)

A few more datapoints, for what it's worth:

- at most ~100 contributors fall in the non-trivial contribution bucket
  if I'm using a total of less than 15 lines changed (even just moved
  around) as a naive threshold.

- probably more that half of the remaining individual contributions (the
  1- or 2-commits bucket) can be either very easily rewritten or have
  already been nuked from the current state of Magit. Not that we
  shouldn't try to collect the paperwork for those, but I suspect the
  occasional failure would be highly manageable.
  So that leaves probably 40 to 50 authors that really need to agree
  before it gets more complicated (if my overall understanding of the
  process is correct).

- eyeballing the top ~20 contributors, it seems to me the vast majority
  of us already have code in Emacs proper, so I assume most of us are
  not opposed to the idea, and have similar paperwork in place.

- the `dash' and `async' dependencies are already in ELPA, leaving only
  packages closely related to `magit' (mostly by the same authors) to be
  taken care of.

So while I'm not trying to diminish the effort needed to get the
paperwork in order (actually the task seems pretty daunting to me :)),
I think it's worth at least asking the question, if that hasn't been
done already.
CC-ing Jonas for a more current perspective.

Thanks

Yann.

-- 
What is each man but a memory for those who follow?

  -- DUKE LETO ATREIDES