[flashrom] Future flashrom development

[Stefan Tauner]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 17:42:11 +0200
Nico Huber <nico.h at gmx.de> wrote:

> What I didn't realize last night: the `staging` branch contains
> valuable information in lots of fixup! commits that would be lost
> if we don't keep `staging`. They look ugly in the log but their
> messages still contain some reasoning about the changes. I prefer
> to use the current `staging` branch as `master` therefore.

*If* there is valuable information in them then they should get into
the final commit message (i.e. the one that squashes everything to
stable). I deem them basically as part of the review process of the
whole change (i.e. the commit eventually committed to stable) and sure,
there is information in it that might be interesting but this likewise
applies to all review comments and I would not want them to be part of
the commit messages, would you?

Some arguments why using staging for anything than hacking is not a
good idea:
 - The information on a change is spread widely. For someone not
   involved in the respective review/development process (i.e.
   everybody but the author of the fixups and respective reviewer(s)) it
   is very hard to track what the actual outcome of all of the fixups
   is. Having a single commit that has a decent commit message solves
   this issue.
 - The log of a branch with lots of interwined fixups as a whole does
   not only look ugly, it does also no longer serve its purpose well:
   reading through it should give a good overview of what the code does.
 - The staging branch does currently and probably will continue to have
   some build problems, and due to the current rate of merged changes
   contain a significant number of undetected run-time bugs as well.
   Both can make bisecting for specific problems tedious if unlucky.

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner