[llvm-dev] [RFC] changing variable naming rules

[Hans Wennborg via llvm-dev]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:42 AM Chris Lattner <clattner at nondot.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Sep 9, 2019, at 4:24 AM, Hans Wennborg via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 6:17 PM Björn Pettersson A via llvm-dev
> > <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >> I'm a little bit curious to hear more about the experiences from the changes in LLD.
> >> I’m thinking about things like:
> > [..]
> >> - merging of bugfixes to older release branches (I doubt that the script supports doing the reverse rewrite as well)
> >
> > As someone who does a lot of these merges, this is the aspect that
> > worries me the most.
>
>
> Yes, I suspect you’re personally the one who is hit the worst by this.  I’m super sensitive to that, because I really really really want to make sure that releases are smooth and successful.
>
> That said, are you aware of Rui’s work on lld?  He developed a process in which people with significant out of tree patches were able to catch up, merge the mega patch and move forward without significant churn.  I agree it is non-zero, but it is very low, and the cost seems worth the price of forward progress and avoiding perpetual stagnation.

I'm not aware of exactly how that worked, but I thought Rui shared his
tool so that downstream repos could do the same conversion that
happened upstream, thereby "catching up". I don't know that we'd want
to do that for a release branch though.

Maybe the solution for the release branches would be to time the
renaming so that it doesn't interfere with releases (e.g. do the
rename shortly before the release branch is created).

I'm not against the renaming per se, I just wanted to highlight that
this is the largest issue I see. Much of the discussion seems to have
focussed on the "git blame" issue, which I don't think is an issue at
all.