A question about "massive" changes in the repository

[Frank Schima]

Hi Mojca,


No one seems to have replied to this so far, so I'll give my $0.02. I don't want your Wx fixes to be held up. 

On Aug 24, 2013, at 5:29 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:

> I have a tiny question about the intended massive change to wxWidgets.
> I was thinking of doing the switch two weeks from now. (I first
> thought of starting with wxPython which is already broken, but now
> that almost all the ports are ready for a commit, it probably makes
> more sense to change all at once.)
> 
> Approximately one half of the ports need an upgrade (mostly because
> they are either nomaintainer or the maintainer didn't upgrade them
> earlier; some ports are de-facto abandoned, but the maintainers
> weren't removed yet), some of them need to be fetched from
> svn/git/mercurial to allow compatibility with wxWidgets 2.9 (some of
> those simply because the upstream stopped uploading tar.gz-s to the
> server and only rely on VCS for distribution of their sources), but
> all ports need a change to account for a different location of
> wxWidgets.
> 
> I'm talking about a bit more than 40 ports in total.
> 
> My questions:
> 
> - Should this be addressed in a single commit or should ports be
> changed one-by-one? (If one-by-one, some ports will be non-functional
> for the time of updating.)
> 
> - If they go to a single commit, what's the proper way to document
> what has been changed in individual ports? Should I create a long
> ChangeLog documenting changes in each individual port and commit with
>    svn ci -F ?

Massive commits with a long detailed commit message happen every now and then. If the changes are all required to work together then a single commit is warranted. The log message can likely be simplified by saying, for example, you are unifying variant names rather than saying that for each port with a variant name change. 

> - I've done a bunch of commits to individual ports already. Is that
> history worth keeping (by merging changes from my personal branch) or
> is it better to simply copy the final change (a simple copy, not
> included any svn trickery) and document all changes in that commit? I
> assume it should be the latter.

The latter makes sense to me, particularly for a large commit as discussed above. But whatever is easier for you is fine. 


HTH,
Frank