Hi All, The kernel team has been running an exploded git tree since Flock last year. This has been mostly a "nice to have", but several people have commented on how useful it is for them when debugging issues, etc. Having the exploded sources with the patches we carry included lets them easily see what we have changed and how. While not a huge burden, this has been mostly an additional effort on top of what we already do. In order to make us a bit more efficient, we've been looking at ways to automate or ease this, as well as make it possible for more than one person to maintain it. This has lead to some discussion around moving to making the exploded git tree the canonical source location for Fedora kernel work. I'm sending this email to start a conversation around that. So what would this mean? It means we'd maintain the exploded source tree very similar to today, with it rebasing on top of whatever upstream we're using as our base. For info on how that works, see the blog post I did about that a while ago. Using this exploded tree, I've created some scripts to generate the pkg-git content. This is probably the biggest workflow change involved. We still need to use pkg-git to do builds in koji, but direct commits to that repo would be disabled outside of a few of us needed to do the syncs. Patches and config changes could be done via email to this list, or possibly via pull request to the branch maintainer of the exploded tree. Why would we do this? A few reasons. First, it allows us to eliminate duplicate maintenance in multiple spots while still providing all the same things we are right now. Second, it moves us to more of an upstream kernel development model and hopefully increases both visibility and communication in terms of what patches/changes go in, etc. It also makes our job easier during rebases, as we can literally use 'git rebase' and work via that instead of having to copy around patches to different trees or manually adjust patches outside of a normal git workflow. Who does this impact? Honestly, not many. There are exactly 4 people that commit to pkg-git today on anything resembling a regular basis. However, it is my hope that changing the workflow a bit makes this somewhat easier for others to work against a tree and submit patches and changes. I'm not under any impressions that it will exponentially increase our contributors, but it will quite possibly make things a bit more transparent. Is this a done decision? No. Not at all. In fact, the scripts aren't even finished yet. I wanted to get the discussion started before really investing heavily in finishing them off. Justin and Laura have copies of the (unfinished) scripts and a howto document on various tasks. I'll likely send the howto out once I get a few of the last remaining steps working for people to read over. But the general idea isn't going to change much, which is why we're talking about this now. When would this happen? Unclear. Certainly not this month as one of the primary stakeholders is on PTO. If the discussion goes well and this direction is something we're going to do, then it might be next month or at some natural cut-over point. Will the exploded tree go away if we don't change to this model? Also unclear. I'd hesitantly say it would stick around, but it might change in the way it is created and published. I'm sure there will be more questions, so please ask away. Looking forward to hearing other's thoughts. josh _______________________________________________ kernel mailing list kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel
