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

[Martin Pool <mbp@canonical.com>]

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?

> 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..

I'll have a look at doing this.  Thanks for looking into it.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>