On 12/7/22 08:49, Marc Zyngier wrote:
On Tue, 06 Dec 2022 21:43:43 +0000,
Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 12/6/22 19:20, Mark Brown wrote:
I almost suggested doing that on multiple occasions this cycle, but ultimately
decided not to because it would effectively mean splitting series that touch KVM
and selftests into different trees, which would create a different kind of
dependency hell. Or maybe a hybrid approach where series that only (or mostly?)
touch selftests go into a dedicated tree?
Some other subsystems do have a separate branch for kselftests. One
fairly common occurrence is that the selftests branch ends up failing to
build independently because someone adds new ABI together with a
selftest but the patches adding the ABI don't end up on the same branch
as the tests which try to use them. That is of course resolvable but
it's a common friction point.
Yeah, the right solution is simply to merge selftests changes
separately from the rest and use topic branches.
Don't know if this is what you have in mind, but I think that we
should use topic branches for *everything*. The only things for which
I don't use a separate branch are the odd drive-by patches, of the
spelling fix persuasion.
Yeah, I just wish we had better tools to manage them...
Paolo
That's what we do for arm64 and the IRQ subsystem. It is a bit more
involved at queuing time, but makes dropping series from -next
extremely easy, without affecting the history. And crucially, it gives
everyone a hint to base their stuff on a stable commit, not a random
"tip of kvm/queue as of three days ago".
M.
