Re: [GIT PULL (not really)] x86/core for v5.16

[Borislav Petkov]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 02:16:24PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> So other developers do this kind of thing fairly regularly, because
> they have some "core branch" that does the basic core development
> (say, a driver subsystem), and then they have other branches (eg the
> lowlevel drivers themselves etc) that depended on the core work but
> are sent as individual pull requests to keep the conceptual separation
> alive, and make it easier to review.

Right, exactly.

> The way to do it tends to be:
> 
>  (a) make it clear that some pull request depends on a previous one,
> so that I'm aware of it, and don't do them out of order and get
> confused

Ok.
 
>  (b) when you have a series of pull requests that aren't independent,
> create the series of pulls yourself in a temporary tree, and generate
> the pull request from that series, with the previous merge always as
> the "base".

Ah ok, that sounds good.

> The reason for (a) is obvious, and the reason for (b) is that then
> each pull request automatically gets the right shortlog and diffstat.
> 
> Of course, if this is the only time you expect to haev this kind of
> dependency, you don't need to have much of a process in place, and a
> hacky manual one-time thing like the above works fine too.

Yeah, it does happen but not too often. With tip, the usual situation
is one branch does change/add something which is needed elsewhere and a
merge is needed. Basically the case you described above.

> And in general, the more independent the pull request can be, the
> better. But having two or more branches that have some serial
> dependency certainly isn't unheard of or wrong either.  It happens.

Yeah.

Ok, thanks for explaining.

/me writes this down for the future.

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

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