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

[Adrian Bunk]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 09:09:34AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>...
> The other is that once somebody says "ok, I *really* need to cause this 
> breakage, because there's a major bug or we need it for fundamental reason 
> XYZ", then that person should
> 
>  (a) create a base tree with _just_ that fundamental infrastructure change,
>      and make sure that base branch is so obviously good that there is no 
>      question about merging it.
> 
>  (b) tell other people about the reason for the infrastructure change, and 
>      simply allow others to merge it. You don't have to wait for *me* to 
>      open the merge window, you need to make sure that the people that get 
>      impacted most can continue development!
> 
> This is where "rebases really are bad" comes in. When the above sequence 
> happens, the fundamental infrastructure change obviously does need to be 
> solid and not shifting under from other people who end up merging it. I do 
> not want to see five different copies of the fundamental change either 
> because the original source fixed it up and rebased it, or because the 
> people who merged it rebased _their_ trees and rebased the fundamental 
> change in the process.
> 
> Can that (b) be my tree? Sure. That's been the common case, and I'll 
> happily continue it, of course, so I'm not arguing for that to go away. 
> Merging is my job, I'll do it. But when the merge window is a problem, my 
> merge window should *not* hold up people from using the distributed nature 
> of git for their advantage.
> 
> But yes, obviously when doing cross-merges, you'd better be really 
> *really* sure that the base is solid and will get merged. But let's face 
> it, all the really core maintainers should damn well know that by now: 
> you've all worked with me for years, so you should be able to trivially be 
> able to tell whether you *might* need to worry about something, and when 
> it's a slam dunk.
> 
> And it's the "it's a slam dunk" cases that I think are (a) the common ones 
> and (b) the ones where you can just do cross-merges to satisfy each others 
> needs.
> 
> Hmm? Does that sound palatable to people?

I'm sure I understand only less than half of what you said.

My current understanding is that all the aspects of your proposal that  
are interesting for me can be summarized as follows:
- your tree stops compiling at the beginning of the merge window when 
  you merge the first subsystem tree
- your tree might compile again at the end of the merge window when you
  merge the last subsystem tree 
- git-bisect -> /dev/null

What do I miss?

> 			Linus

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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