Re: XFS Master Branch Rebase

From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
To: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
	xfs@oss.sgi.com, Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Subject: Re: XFS Master Branch Rebase
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:19:46 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100728111946.GA10824@infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20100728110954.GG655@dastard>

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 09:09:54PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> If you call a single merge of 2.6.35-rc6 back into the for-2.6.36
> branch a "merge mess", then I'm guilty as charged.  However (and it
> is a *BIG* however),

It wasn't that simple.  We had a few unclean merges from mainline and
from for-linux to for-2.6.36 or similar branches.

> I haven't asked Alex to pull from that tree
> and upstream should not be pulling from downstream trees without a
> specific request to do so.
> 
> I'm maintaining that whole tree for _my_ benefit - I need a
> mainline-based tree that also contains all the non-mainline XFS
> commits, and I need to be able to update them independently.  Just
> because the tree contains a branch named "for-2.6.36" and has XFS
> commits that are not yet upstream doesn't mean the branch is a
> upstream pull target.

Yeah.  The normal way to maintain a development branch is to stay
is to never pull in mainline into an existing branch.  If we absolutely
need to update to a newer version from Linus' tree it should be rebased
ontop of it.  Unfortunately we'll need to do this once in a while
for something like XFS which has rather complex interactions with core
VM and VFS changes, so expecting the xfs development branch to be
a stable target is not generally a good idea.

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