On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:08:21 -0700 (PDT) David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > From: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:53:53 -0700 > > > 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 know this doesn't work for you, but if you ran -mm just like any > other GIT tree it might mesh a whole lot better. A lot of -mm is "small random subsystem trees", maybe 100 in total. They'd work fine as git trees. There are also 100-odd "trees" in -mm (many of which have zero length) which are "things to bug a subsystem maintainer with". Alas, subsystem maintainers like to fumble the patches I send them, then merge other stuff which breaks the patches which I'm maintaining for them. So in reality each of those 100-odd trees is based on and tracks a separate git tree. Or, of course, on linux-next.. Sometimes I end up maintaining these for a *long* time - years. Then there are the nasty ones - patches which weren't factored into "core patch followed by per-maintainer patches" and which need to go in as a single hit. Fortuntely these are relatively rare and we _could_ push harder to break them into core-plus-per-maintainer form. Or I could just lose the emails ;) They often tend to not be terribly important. > And in reality that kind of situation isn't a big deal in the > context of -next. People are rebasing their trees all the time > there, and it mostly seems to work itself out. > > It's a lot more work for a contributor to do work against -mm, > since the response to "which -mm should I work against and where > do I get it from" is a bit more involved that just "pull from > this GIT tree and do your work on top of that." > > And just like networking we could have Stephen treat the -mm > GIT tree as "important" which roughly means that other conflicting > trees will be knocked out of a -next release in deference to -mm. > > Those people will have to fix their stuff, not you. And you'll > always therefore get coverage in -next. Yes, but then people would end up being based on linux-next, and that's a pretty rubbery target with all the rebasing and trees getting dropped, etc. And they'd accidentally end up having to actually compile and run linux-next, shock-horror-oh-the-humanity. > Unlike the general sentiment expressed here, I think -next is helping. > Even if only because Stephen pokes people with trees causing problems > on a daily basis. yup. Plus the runtime testing. I doubt if the world would end if we just stopped trying to run any of these uber-trees. Everyone bases their work on mainline and then everything goes smash/bang/curse during the merge window. It wouldn't be pretty, but it'd sure make people merge their trees promptly ;) -- 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
