Better testing when patching divers/staging/ - howto?

[greg@kroah.com (Greg KH)]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 10:11:19PM +0200, Matthias Beyer wrote:
> On 05-09-2014 11:54:45, Greg KH wrote:
> >
> > > I do not have that much ressources to always build a full kernel for
> > > only one patchset, so would it be okay to (locally) merge my patchsets
> > > into a temporary branch and build a (allyesconfig) kernel out of all
> > > my patchsets?
> >
> > Why?  If you just change one file, 'make' will only rebuild that one
> > file.
> 
> Well, there comes git into play: If I do a build for
> each branch I have, this takes a huge amount of time for all
> patchsets, as when checking out another patchset, files get changed.
> 
> At this very moment, I have 15 patchsets ready for submission and one
> I'm working on. Doing
> 
>     for ps in patchsets; do make -j 8; done
> 
> still takes a lot of time then. That's why I asked the question.

What is a "patchset" in this context?  You need to test the build at
_every_ patch, to not do so isn't ok.

> > > In addition, I do not have the appropriate hardware to actually _run_
> > > the code. I always state this in my patchset messages, of course!
> >
> > It would be great if you could find some hardware, I really want to just
> > delete this driver as no one seems to have the hardware anymore.
> > You can only clean up just so much stuff without having to start to
> > change the logic in the code, and you need the hardware to test that.
> 
> This sounds like the work I'm doing is a waste of time? Shall I
> continue with my patches?
> 
> If not, I will find another staging driver I can work on, so no
> problem! :-)

I can't tell anyone what to work on, but again, I really want to just
delete the driver as it is quite horrid.  If you don't have the hardware
for it, and you don't want to get it, I suggest working on something
else that actually has a chance of getting merged to the proper portion
of the kernel tree.

No one who originally had the hardware does anymore, and wimax is all
but dead, so it is not something anyone seems to care about.

thanks,

greg k-h