Add definitions of fat, double, and wide pointers

[samWson]

Definition of fat pointer referenced from Programming Rust by Jim Blandy & Jason Orendorff, published by O'Reilly. Page 214: References to Slices and Trait Objects.

Definitions of double, and wide pointers refer back to fat pointers.

[mark-i-m]

LGTM

Thanks!

[mark-i-m]

Could you please rebase?

[samWson]

@mark-i-m I haven't done much rebasing before, but I am familiar the concept. Do you want me to rebase my last commit (5cccbd) on top of the last commit before I made my changes (cd053f3)?

[mark-i-m]

@samWson No worries. You should rebase this entire branch over master as follows:

# first we will update master
git checkout master
git pull origin master

# then we will rebase glossary-fat-pointers onto master

git checkout glossary-fat-pointers
git rebase master

What this does is rewind the changes on glossary-fat-pointers, update glossary-fat-pointers to look like master, and then replay your changes on glossary-fat-pointers. The end result is that master is unchanged, but glossary-fat-pointers looks like master with your changes at the end of the history.

Does that make sense?

[samWson]

@mark-i-m yes I think that makes sense. I've followed your instructions. I think I've complicated things by forking the rust-lang-nursery/rustc-guide repo to my Github account, and using my Github repo as the remote for the copy on my computer.

Is rebasing a feature branch on master the standard practice before making pull requests?

[mark-i-m]

I think I've complicated things by forking the rust-lang-nursery/rustc-guide repo to my Github account, and using my Github repo as the remote for the copy on my computer.

That's pretty common. I don't know what others do or if this is the easiest way, but I usually add another remote for the original:

git remote add rustc-guide /~https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustc-guide.git

Then you can

git checkout master
git pull rustc-guide master # EDITED

Is rebasing a feature branch on master the standard practice before making pull requests?

Different projects have different practices. Some projects are ok with merge commits, so just doing a git merge master would be ok. Other projects like to have a "linear" history (i.e. no merges/branches), so rebasing is preferred. Still others prefer a rebase and a squash (combine all commits from the PR into one big commit).

In general, the rust community seems to prefer the rebasing approach (without squashing).

Also, usually, github can do the rebase for you, and you don't have to do it manually, but if there are conflicts (as in this PR), github will ask you to manually resolve them first...

EDIT: sorry, i got the pull command wrong... fixed above

[samWson]

@mark-i-m thanks. That helps. Is there anything more I need to do at my end for this PR?

[mark-i-m]

Oh, hmm... I'm not sure what exactly happened, but I think the rebase didn't quite go correctly. It looks like the history has a duplicate of commits and github still is not happy (heh, don't worry, everyone does this on their first rebase 😛 ).

How did you resolve the rebase conflicts?

[mark-i-m]

So, here is what I did to resolve the conflicts on my local copy:

First, make sure you have a clean repo (meaning there are no uncommitted edits). If there are, you can use git stash to clean up for now and git stash pop to restore them later.

git checkout master
git pull rustc-guide master # this should not require any merge commits
git checkout glossary-fat-pointers
git rebase master
# at this point, you should see a message that their was a conflict on src/appendix-glossary.md.
# open that file with some editor, and you should see the conflicts between >>>>> and <<<<<.
# Edit the file to whichever version you want, save and exit the editor. If you've done a merge with
# conflicts before, this should be familiar.
git add src/appendix-glossary.md
git rebase --continue
# You will probably get one more conflict. Do the same thing again.
# When you do git rebase --continue, this time you may get a warning about "no changes".
# If so, just do 
git rebase --skip
# It should complete now...

After all this, you should be able to do git log and see just your two new commits adding the definitions.

Let me know if you run into any hiccups. git can be tricky until you git the hang of it (pun intended).

[mark-i-m]

Oh, one other thing. Rebasing rewrites history, so you will need to git push --force to get github to accept it. Make sure that your rebased branch looks correct (git diff master) before you do this, so as not to lose anything.

[samWson]

@mark-i-m Done. Your instructions were very helpful. Sorry for the delay, life got really busy for me last week. Let me know if there is anything more that needs doing.

[mark-i-m]

No worries! Thanks for the PR :)