Re: [GIT PULL] VFIO updates for v3.8

[Stephen Rothwell]

Hi Alex,

On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:06:56 -0700 Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Is that a bad thing?  I can start tagging from my next branch if that's
> preferred.  Thanks,

Linus has said many times to not rebase before sending a pull request.
When you rebase your tree you effectively throw away your testing (since
the thing you rebased on top of may have introduced semantic conflicts
with the work in your tree).  If you don't rebase your tested tree, any
conflicts are then restricted to the actual merge and can be fixed there
(or at least the diagnosis will lead there).

So, if I was a maintiner, at the start of the merge window (or just
before) I would create a test branch that contained my work plus a
*merge* with Linus' tree and do some testing on that and then ask Linus
to pull my tree (not the merged version).  It may prove that the test
merge with Linus' tree produces an "interesting" syntactic conflict - in
this case I would mention that to Linus and put the merged tree somewhere
public for him to use as a guide.  (Mind you, this conflict would already
have most likely been noted by the linux-next maintainer.)

Also, your testing may have brought to light a semantic conflict, in
which case the fix could be supplied to Linus with the pull request, or a
well changed logged back merge of Linus' tree containing the fix could be
done and Linus asked to pull the result.

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell                    sfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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