[GRASS5] Jan's copyright notice ++

Justin Hickey jhickey at hpcc.nectec.or.th
Thu Nov 9 23:03:13 EST 2000


Justin Hickey wrote:
> 
> Hello all
> 
> Andreas Lange wrote:
> > thank you for your patience. I think all questions are answered now.
> 
> OK, then since Frank seems to be busy, I'll update the SUBMITTING file
> the way he proposed earlier.

Heh! Now I do have a concern with the log messages being used in the
header. While looking into the use of the $Log$ keyword in the document
"Version Management with CVS" by Per Cederqvist et al, I came across the
following warning in section 12.5 "Problems with the $Log$ keyword"

=================== Begin Text =======================================

The $Log$ keyword is somewhat controversial. As long as you are working
on your development system the information is easily accessible even if
you do not use the $Log$ keyword -- just do a cvs log. Once you export
the file the history information might be useless anyhow.

A more serious concern is that CVS is not good at handling $Log$ entries
when a branch is merged onto the main trunk. Conflicts often result from
the merging operation.

People also tend to "fix" the log entries in the file (correcting
spelling mistakes and maybe even factual errors). If that is done the
information from cvs log will not be consistent with the information
inside the file. This may or may not be a problem in real life.

It has been suggested that the $Log$ keyword should be inserted last in
the file, and not in the files header, if it is to be used at all. That
way the long list of change messages will not interfere with everyday
source file browsing.

=================== End Text =======================================

What concerns me is the second paragraph concerning the conflicts that
can result from a merge operation. Since we are about to create a new
branch that will eventually be merged back in, then I think we need to
take this problem into consideration.

Without any experience with this problem, I would recommend that we do
not use the $Log$ keyword to avoid what could be major headaches in the
future given the size of Grass. Am I being paranoid? What do people
think?

-- 
Sincerely,

Jazzman (a.k.a. Justin Hickey)  e-mail: jhickey at hpcc.nectec.or.th
High Performance Computing Center
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
Bangkok, Thailand
==================================================================
People who think they know everything are very irritating to those
of us who do.  ---Anonymous

Jazz and Trek Rule!!!
==================================================================

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