From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: linux@arm.linux.org.uk (Russell King - ARM Linux)
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:56:12 +0100
Subject: [GIT PULL] GIC DT binding support
In-Reply-To: <4EA055AF.4030207@gmail.com>
References: <4E97A601.1020005@gmail.com> <201110201507.38722.arnd@arndb.de>
	<4EA03160.1050304@gmail.com> <201110201812.29202.arnd@arndb.de>
	<4EA055AF.4030207@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20111020185612.GD21648@n2100.arm.linux.org.uk>
To: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
List-Id: linux-arm-kernel.lists.infradead.org

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 12:09:03PM -0500, Rob Herring wrote:
> highbank/soc doesn't build. It needs Russell's l2x0 and io branches.
> l2x0 has been rebased recently, but the io branch seems to be stable
> (but not published externally).

Actually, l2x0 _hasn't_.  Let's be clear about what happened.  A load
of patches were all merged into the 'misc' branch over time, containing
multiple different subjects.  At the time they were merged there was
no clear separate line of development of each sub-system, so they
just ended up in a common branch without any particular ordering or
grouping.

People wanted to base work on a select few of those commits.  Rather
than having the entire set of commits merged into various peoples trees,
many of which have nothing to do with what they were working on, I
split various commits out of the 'misc' branch and created a set of
more fine-grained topic branches.

That is arguably not rebasing - it is re-committing, in such a way that
those parts can then be frozen, stabilized and published without
unintended dependencies.  That's got to be a good thing.