At Wed, 21 May 2008 12:02:29 -0700 (PDT), Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Wed, 21 May 2008, Takashi Iwai wrote: > > > > > - cherry-pick it. Is it a small, simple patch that you want, but that > > > isn't really worth pulling in all the other stuff that you simply don't > > > know? > > > > > > This isn't wrong. It shouldn't be *common*, but it's not wrong to have > > > the same patch in two different branches. It makes sense if it is > > > something you really want, but it's still not important or complex > > > enough to actually mege everything else! > > > > Hm, that's what I didn't consider seriously. I thought cherry-picking > > patches may cause merge errors easily. > > Cherry-picking can certainly cause merge errors, but not generally very > often. > > Cherry-picking by definition will obviously apply the *same* patch to two > different branches, and as a result, when you merge, that merge will > generally be totally clean. So a trivial merge that succeeds without you > even noticing is actually the common case. > > But you can certainly get merge failures where you then have to fix things > up if there were *other* changes to that same area. At that point, you end > up with two different branches that changed the same few lines > differently, and it doesn't matter if then _some_ of the changes were > identical - the fact that others were not is enough to cause a merge > conflict. > > If cherry-picking is an uncommon situation, the merge problems are not > going to show up (and when they do, they'll generally be simple to > resolve, especially if you limit cherry-picking to simple fixes). But if > you do a *lot* of cherry-picking, and you cherry-pick big changes, then > yes, you'll start hitting merge problems. > > So cherry-picking is fine if you do it (a) fairly seldom and (b) just to > small patches, because then the upsides of cherry-picking (easy to get a > single fix without merging everything else) are bigger than the downsides > (the potential merge problems later). > > IOW, think of cherry-picking as just another tool. It has upsides and > downsides. It's not "wrong" per se, but you can use it the wrong way. You > shouldn't use a hammer on a screw, and you shouldn't use cherry-picking > for big and complex stuff. Thanks for clarification! Sounds like I should really do this more often to keep the devel tree clean without merge or rebase. Takashi _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list Alsa-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mailman.alsa-project.org/mailman/listinfo/alsa-devel