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Comment by josegonzalez | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to import the PHP source-tree first, then apply each patch one at a time/in a batch. That way applying these patches at a later date would have been easier.

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That's what was done.

https://github.com/infusion/PHP/commit/790d551ac9ef8e204b44f...

Why oh why didn't he fork php/php-src, make a branch for his changes, then commit as he went along? This just ends up as a big patchbomb. They're never going to merge his changes, and I don't blame them.

EDIT - Hopefully we can straighten this around: https://github.com/infusion/PHP/commit/790d551ac9ef8e204b44f...

In this case, it would be better to maintain it as several topic branches (so that each logical change can be implemented in as many patches as necessary), and then a good old octopus merge as "master" that you force-update every so often.

(Yes, everyone hates you for modifying published history, it's evil, it will give you bad breath, yeah yeah yeah. But you have to think of this use case as a "code wiki" rather than "list of changes leading to the current state". After the patches are accepted, then don't force update them. When they are still in flux, modify history as often as necessary to make your changes easily comprehensible.)

His work is based off 5.3.x, there is probably a branch for it in the official SVN repo. As one commenter noted, the github mirror is stale so he'd need to fork it and then update it with the official svn to find the branch.

It may make sense to rebase it off of trunk of svn.

What do you mean by force update?

master would always contain the php-base+the octopus merge. So if the php-base was 5.3.6, it would be 5.3.6+patches. Tomorrow PHP 5.3.7 comes out, and then master would be 5.3.7+patches.

No it wasn't. As sc68cal says, its a patchbomb. And if you think otherwise, let me know how I can revert his changes to remove short tags and the mysql* changes using a single git command (hint, there isn't).

I'm all for changes to an open source project - whether it acts like one or not - but every open source developer should, at some point, learn that gigantic patchsets with lots of unrelated changes are a big no-no.

I'm just pissed that he didn't even bother to actually fork the project. On Github! WOW! All the previous commits before the fork? Gone. Poof. It's completely without any context. Even though there's a big "FORK" button!

Well what project would he fork? The (apparently) official PHP mirror is way out of date:

https://github.com/php/php-src

Well, then just use git svn to update the master of his fork to match the official PHP svn. It'll just be a fast forward anyway.

Two birds with one stone.

I work on it. I currently update the git repo with the svn sources. This is somewhat slow... May I ask what you want to do with the dissected patches? Try to build a "clean" version as pbiggar has said?

This doesn't concern me as much, so long as he has a note saying "compiled onto commit hash blah". Cherry-picking would be a pain, but doable at that point.

Well I wasn't sure what you meant by in a batch. I agree that it wasn't well done, but I wasn't commenting on that.

It's especially interesting considering he says this in the comments:

...I don't want to leave it as a stand alone project. I modified PHP as proof of concept in order to get these changes into one of the next releases.

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