On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:36:07 +0100 Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > first. So everyone who has been changing stuff which is outside their > > area of responsibility and breaking other people's stuff would get to > > see the consequences of their actions instead of Stephen and I bearing > > the brunt of it all the time. > > > > > > I fear we've reached the stage now where people are merrily merging > > bright-and-shiny things into their local trees without giving much > > thought at all to the consequences for others. > > Its not that simple. There are areas where the tree divides don't fit the > coding divides. ttydev was horribly entwined with USB and there really > wasn't a way to break that up at the time in question. Because -next > tries to assemble all the trees based on Linus tree it can't cope with > that case well at all and in fact there was some neccessary rule bending > to make next work out where some of the ttydev work was done with ttydev > on top of other subtrees. Yes, sometimes there are nasty special cases and I of course understand that and I did allow for it in making that assertion. There's quite a lot of gratuitous lazy stuff happening too. > So at times it would be very helpful with -next to be able to do limited > tree ordering. If I could have flagged tty as requiring USB first for > example there would have been a lot less pain involved. Well there's an alternative here: you base the ttydev tree on top of linux-next. That way we spread the load around a bit. But the problem here is that once linux-next merges your patches, you no longer have a tree on which to base your patches! You need to get your hands on "linux-next without my stuff" to maintain them. I'm in the same situation with -mm and I do have a scheme planned for that, but it'll involve asking Stephen to add a "mm starts here" tag, so I can extract "linux-next without my stuff". (I still haven't got around to making this happen - I've become a fulltime reject fixer). But the problem with that scheme is that it'd be hard to generalise for other trees. Or maybe not - we can just say "Alan goes first, then -mm". Then you piggyback on top of the infrastructure which I use. Then again, the ttydev problem was hopefully a once-off, so we don't need to do anything now. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-next" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
