Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [GIT PULL] ARM: SoC fixes (and a cross-arch dt-include fix)

[Daniel Vetter]

On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Olof Johansson <olof@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [adding ksummit-discuss]
>
> On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 4:44 AM, Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 9:34 PM, Olof Johansson <olof@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>>  - We've started telling people to avoid cross-tree shared branches if all
>>>    they're doing is picking up one or two DT-used constants from a
>>>    shared include file, and instead to use the numeric values on first
>>>    submission. Follow-up moving over to symbolic names are sent in right
>>>    after -rc1, i.e. here. It's only a few minor patches of this type.
>>
>> OK it seems like a reasonable process.
>>
>> It's not like I can think about anything better.
>>
>> I was more opting for doing things this way:
>>
>> - Create bindings and <dt-bindings/foo/bar.h> merge it into the
>>   foo subsystem.
>>
>> - Merge driver into drivers/foo/bar.c that use <dt-bindings/foo/bar.h>
>>
>> - Submit DTS patch to ARM SoC (or whetever) using only numerical
>>   values.
>>
>> - After the merge window, follow up with a patch replacing the
>>   numerical constants with #defines from <dt-bindings/foo/bar.h>
>
> You're describing exactly what we've been pushing people towards.
>
> If it's just a few simple references it's not significantly more
> awkward, and decouples merges and removes need for stable branches.
> Essentially we've become slightly more lax in what we're willing to
> consider _right after_ -rc1 to include these tweaks (and often patches
> to turn on new drivers in defconfigs).
>
> If the amount of contents grows too large we might need to tweak
> things further, maybe with something pre-rc1 but that's more awkward.
>
>> An alternative would obviously be to wait for the next merge window
>> after merging the driver patch but I guess people are too impatient
>> to do that (including me).
>
> Yeah, asking people to spread out across releases would remove
> dependencies a lot, but it would also slow down progress and frustrate
> a lot of contributors so we don't do that.
>
>> We discussed cross-tree dependencies a bit on ksummit-discuss
>> but this solution was not mentioned back then.
>
> I thought it was, but I wasn't fully engaged in the discussion. We've
> also only started this over the last release or two so it's early to
> tell just how well it'll work in reality. Cc:ing the list.

Yeah, this sounds like a good step towards improving what I've
complained about, while still keeping topic/shared stable branch
proliferation under control.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch