Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> How can we simplify things? Part of the design of this new proposal was
> to change as little as possible from the existing setup (people's habits
> are hard to change), and yet to make my life and Linus's life much
> easier. In the long run, it will make your life easier, to the extent
> that having an up-to-date bug list is easier, and because then I won't
> have to continually pester people about whether certain bugs have been
> fixed.
OK.
Today we fixed a problem in a driver we maintain here. We should've
gone ahead and generate the patch and queued it for Linus. However,
in reality we'd like the complaining customer to test the patch first.
So under a "good" patch maintenance system, I'd have liked to generate
the patch, and have it wait until I approve it.
That way, it might be available for "public" testing by others, while
I can give the "goahead" to send to Linus or retract the patch if it
doesn't work as advertized.
Another features that I REALLY REALLY would like in a patch
maintenance system would be that it could try and automatically
(re-)generate the patch against a different kernel version:
Suppose I make a patch against 2.4.0-test8 and then Linus releases a
newer version (possibly even before I give the "goahead bug Linus")
Then applying my patch to 2.4.0-test9 and generating a new patch
against 2.4.0-test9-clean is one possibility. The other is to apply
patch-2.4.0-test9 to my patched kernel. The results could be compared
for consistency.....
Also, sometimes a backport of a patch is required. Automating that as
far as possible is useful! (What Larry McVoy seems to miss is that
"automated patch-port failed" is a valid answer, as long as it works
in 99% of the cases).
Isn't this "new" patch maintenance system much like bitkeeper?
Roger.
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* * Common sense is the collection of * ****** prejudices acquired by age eighteen. -- Albert Einstein ******** - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 15 2000 - 21:00:21 EST