Re: [GIT PULL] at91: defconfig for 4.3 #2

From: Olof Johansson
Date: Thu Aug 20 2015 - 20:02:45 EST


On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Alexandre Belloni
<alexandre.belloni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 18/08/2015 at 23:49:30 +0200, Olof Johansson wrote :
>> > The only thing now is that since the at91 tree is in linux-next as well
>> > as the arm-soc tree, those patches appear twice there and there is a
>> > conflict (easy to fix, but a pain). The solution here is to update the
>> > at91 tree to be somewhere in the arm-soc tree (probably just reset to
>> > the point where the two trees match in patches but not commits). This
>> > has the downside that the at91 tree will be rebased which will affect
>> > any development work that is based on that.
>> >
>> > If there was just one patch in common, it maybe have been better to
>> > just merge the at91 tree and fix the conflict in the merge.
>>
>> Yeah, this is a somewhat frustrating situation for us. I wonder if we
>> should essentially tag the downstream ARM platform trees in -next such
>> that if they conflict with arm-soc, you can drop them for a day if
>> needed.
>>
>> It's really useful for us to be able to occasionally adjust a pull
>> request instead of always merging them exactly as they're presented to
>> us. It saves a roundtrip to the maintainer for trivial stuff, we can
>> take care of it and not have to look at it again. We often do send it
>> back to the maintainers to respin, but in this particular case it
>> seemed appropriate to just deal with it locally for us.
>>
>> The downstream users vs rebasing git trees is of course another
>> aspect. Here I'm mostly relying on subplatform maintainers to know
>> well how many people actually develop on top of their trees. I think
>> for most platforms it's a fairly limited use. Interesting enough, I
>> can't remember last time someone told me they couldn't respin a pull
>> request to fix something up due to downstream developers (not that we
>> have _all_ that many of those requests).
>>
>
> I think there is no issue to rebase at91-next apart from Nicolas being
> on holiday and the fact that I don't have access to it.
>
>> The other way to handle this would be to only apply patches directly
>> and not do merges. Most other high-volume maintainers have exactly
>> this workflow. We've been able to avoid reverting to that, thankfully
>> (since we can delegate most of the reviews and patch applications this
>> way).
>>
>
> On an other topic but not completely unrelated, I see that you are
> adding your SoB only on merge commits so basically, when the merge is a
> fast forward, your SoB doesn't appear at all.
> For now, I've chosen to apply PRs as patches to add my SoB, is that
> something I can avoid?

Right, we can't add a S-o-b on non-merge commits since that would in
effect be a rebase.

Also, we never do ff merges in our tree, since it hides the merge path
and we want to make it possible to determine who merged the code.

The fact that we add S-o-b on the merge commit is sort of nonstandard,
but it shows which one of us did the merge (the commit author would
too, but it does happen that we rebase).


-Olof
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