[m-rev.] Upgrading Boehm GC, the git way.

[Paul Bone]

Rather than presenting a diff for review, I'd like to present my goals and
workflow for upgrading Boehm GC for review.  I'm looking for comments on
whether this is how we should track Boehm GC, as well as a review of the
process that I've used (attached).

Now that we use git to manage Mercury, I've attempted to upgrade Boehm GC
"the git way".  This should be reviewed by someone with a solid
understanding of git who might see a caveat that I havn't.

what I've attempted to do here is to import the git history of boehm GC into
our repository.  Then upgrading git in the future is done by adding the
boehm_gc repository as a remote, fetching changes, and merging them into our
master branch.  This may be convenient but the drawback is that we will then
store Boehm GC's history in our repository, which is not necessary and makes
the repository larger (I use a local mirror (a bare repository) I wonder if
other developers do).  I've attached an updated
compiler/notes/upgrade_boehm_gc.html file that documents the process I
followed, could someone review it please?

An alternative method to maintain Boehm GC would be to distribute an
upstream tarball and store in git a set of patches that should be applied to
the tarball after it is unpacked but before it is built.  This may be more
difficult to maintain (we won't have git's help when patches conflict after
upgrading boehm) but it means keeping our repository smaller.

Thanks.


-- 
Paul Bone
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