Re: support for bzr shelve/unshelve in vc-dir

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Martin Pool <mbp@canonical.com> writes:

  > 2009/12/11 Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>:
  > > This discussion started in part because of the perceived difficulty of
  > > getting a patch integrated to implement "bzr unshelve --keep"
  > > (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/492091)
  > 
  > I would be the first to agree that we have made it too hard to get
  > changes in in the past, and that while we are doing better now we can
  > still do more.  However, I can't find any history with this particular
  > request, just a recently-filed bug?

I don't think that's the whole history here.

  > > bzr shelves are not very usable without this option, you can't go back
  > > and forth between shelved versions.
  > > The patch would change bzrlib/shelf_ui.py:Unshelver.from_args to set
  > > delete_shelf to False when "--keep" is passed.  So about 3 lines total.
  > >
  > > Would such a patch need copyright assignment?
  > > Even if it does, given the above description, a bzr developer can
  > > reproduce the change needed in a few seconds...
  > > Can you please help get this solved?
  > 
  > Yes, it would need copyright assignment.  We do this on every patch
  > because our legal opinion said that there is no globally-recognized
  > concept of "too small to copyright", and because we want to have clear
  > copyright.  Many developers, both at Canonical and otherwise, have
  > given feedback that they think the FSF approach of saying "about a
  > paragraph" (or whatever it precisely is) is a reasonable commonsense
  > tradeoff..

FYI: the FSF policy is to require a copyright assignment from someone
that submits a number of small patches, so it's not possible to work
around the copyright requirement by splitting a larger change into many
smaller ones.

It looks like bzr unshelve --keep will make it into the next version,
thanks for taking care of it!