Re: Vendor branches on sourceware.org's binutils-gdb repo

Matt Rice
2014-04-09T01:49:20Z

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 7:52 AM, Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 16:27:22 +0200 (CEST)
>> From: Michael Matz <matz@suse.de>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Sun, 6 Apr 2014, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>>
>> > > I think it's very useful for users to have all vendor branches in a
>> > > single repository. At least with glibc this has helped me a lot (as a
>> > > user) when identifying and cherry-picking needed fixes to my own
>> > > systems.
>> >
>> > FWIW: I have found that the extra branches are just making me download
>> > lots of commits that I have no use for, and I suspect that this is the
>> > case for many of us. That's the default behavior, and most users will be
>> > impacted by those. While it's convenient, it is also very easy to pull a
>> > branch from another repository.
>>
>> But it's not necessarily easy for the vendor to _host_ that other
>> repository.
>
> Really? Are there really companies that are active in the Free
> Software community that don't have the infrastructure to host a
> relatively small git repo?

I generally prefer working in the distributed model, but I think it
makes sense for sourceware to host it, for copyright assignment
purposes
it makes it clear and easy to decide if effort on a branch can be
merged by a third party into master, which happens on occasion.

I would probably be happier if there was a separate repository
binutils+gdb-vendor.git or some such though.