Hi everyone, Many of you have complained (both publicly and privately) about the heavy cost of rebasing your development trees, particularly when you're getting close to sending a series out for review. I get it, there have been a lot of large refactoring patchsets coming in the past few kernel cycles, and this has caused a lot of treewide churn. I don't mind cleanups of things that have been weird and wonky about XFS for years, but, frankly, rebasing is soul-grinding. To that end, I propose reducing the frequency of (my own) for-next pushes to reduce how often people feel compelled to rebase when they're trying to get a series ready for review. Specifically, I would like to make an informal for-next push schedule as follows: 1 Between -rc1 and -rc4, I'll collect critical bug fixes for the merge window that just closed. These should be small changes, so I'll put them out incrementally with the goal of landing everything in -rc4, and they shouldn't cause major disruptions for anyone else working on a big patchset. This is more or less what I've been doing up till now -- if it's been on the list for > 24h and someone's reviewed it, I'll put it in for-next for wider testing. 2 A day or two after -rc4 drops. This push is targeted for the next merge window. Coming three weeks after -rc1, I hope this will give everyone enough time for a round of rebase, review, and debugging of large changesets after -rc1. IOWs, the majority of patchsets should be ready to go in before we get halfway to the next merge window. 3 Another push a day or two after -rc6 drops. This will hopefully give everyone a second chance to land patchsets that were nearly ready but didn't quite make it for -rc4; or other cleanups that would have interfered with the first round. Once this is out, we're more or less finished with the big patchsets. 4 Perhaps another big push a day or two after -rc8 drops? I'm not keen on doing this. It's not often that the kernel goes beyond -rc6 and I find it really stressful when the -rc's drag on but people keep sending large new patchsets. Talk about stumbling around in the dark... 5 Obviously, I wouldn't hold back on critical bug fixes to things that are broken in for-next, since the goal is to promote testing, not hinder it. Hopefully this will cut down on the "arrrgh I was almost ready to send this but then for-next jumped and nggghghghg" feelings. :/ Thoughts? Flames? --D
