Re: [git pull] drm-fixes

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Jan 26 2009 - 17:08:58 EST




On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Sam Ravnborg wrote:

> >
> > Well I'm not 100% sure what happened for this patch, I suspect,
> > jbarnes sent patch a week
> > or two ago, it misapplied against the tree I had currently when
> > applied with git-am, it didn't work so I hand
> > applied the patch with patch and then did git commit
> > --author="jbarnes" as he did write it, I just munged it.
> >
> > Now I'm unsure how I should best handle this, in a world where I can
> > devote a lot more time to
> > maintaining this, I would sent Jesse a mail saying, rebase, he'd reply
> > with a rebase and I'd apply it,
> > however I generally find it easier to just fix this stuff up on the
> > run as its synchronous. Should
> > I be specifying a date somewhere in the commit message?
>
> My simple way to deal with this is to:
>
> 0) save the mail
> 1) fix subject and changelog and add my Signed-off-by:
> 2) apply the patch somehow
> 3) replace the origianl patch in the (saved) mail
> 4) git reset --hard (or patch -p1 -R < saved-mail)
> 5) git am <saved mail>
>
> There must be easier ways to do so I think.

Um. Yes. Something like

git am -s -C1

which ends up requiring just a single line of context for the patch to
apply, exactly like the GNU 'patch' program.

The difference being that GNU patch does that incredibly broken thing by
default, and makes it easy to apply a patch that was already applied quite
by mistake, because it still works. Git will require you to say explicitly
that it's ok to have just a single line of context.

Anyway, on its own I wouldn't have reacted - sure, you can just do the
whole "use patch and then commit as another user" and the times will be
odd, but the *big* issue with Dave's pull-request was that there were
multiple cases of just clearly lost information.

In other words, I don't care about the dates. I don't care _how_ you do
your git commits. And I don't even care if you use the broken "patch"
command that accepts random line noise as a patch, as long as you check it
later.

But I _do_ care when it looks like somebody is using a bad process that
clearly isn't working, and that clearly is dropping things on the floor.
If it's a "odd things happens very occasionally because I had to use a
special sequence for it", that's fine.

So when 3 out of 8 patches were somehow missing information (two without
sign-offs, and the third that had a sign-off but was obviously also done
by the odd sequence that dropped the timestamp), that's no longer just
some occasional issue and is a more endemic process problem.

Linus
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