Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

[Stephen Rothwell]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:21:33 -0800 Greg KH <greg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Note that a lot of these are already in the MAINTAINERS file.
> 
> But for the record, here's mine, in the order they need to be pulled
> from.
>   Driver core:
> 	kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/gregkh-01-driver/
>   PCI:
> 	kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/gregkh-02-pci/
>   USB:
> 	kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/gregkh-03-usb/
> 
> These are all quilt trees, with the series file in the directory for the
> order of the patches, and a README saying what kernel version they have
> been rebased against.

Thank you.  Over time we might think about some sort of standard for
these.

> Oh oh oh, I get merged first!  me me me!

What's it worth to you?  :-)

> This is going to get really interesting, especially when (not if) we do
> more global api changes.  Look at the last round of kobject changes.
> That touched a lot of different places, and other trees ended up not
> building because of it, because I changed apis and they had added new
> code based on the old apis.

This is one of the things that linux-next will hopefully let us discover
more easily/faster.

> I think the only way to fix this is not going to just "drop the tree"
> like you are suggesting, but to let both people know (the person who
> caused the change, and the person who's tree broke after the merge), and
> then either add a "fixup patch" for the build like Andrew has been
> doing, or disabling something from the build section.

Right. Except that "drop the tree" will probably only mean for a day or
so i.e. it will be taken out of the current round but will reappear
automatically when the conflict/dependency is sorted out.

> As I know I'm going to be changing more driver core apis[1] this week,
> I'm sure we will get a very good set of examples of this for you to see
> in action :)

Excellent!

However, I am hoping that these global api changes may be introduced in a
more orderly fashion (some of which is happening already) by creating new
api's and then switching to them (and them maybe changing the names back
if necessary).  And, yes, I realise that this is sometimes not possible
(or at least not worth the extra effort).

> Good luck,

Thanks, I will probably need it :-(

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell                    sfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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