Re: [GIT PULL] VFIO updates for v3.8

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

Hi Stephen,

On Wed, 2012-12-12 at 11:44 +1100, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:06:56 -0700 Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Is that a bad thing?  I can start tagging from my next branch if that's
> > preferred.  Thanks,
> 
> Linus has said many times to not rebase before sending a pull request.
> When you rebase your tree you effectively throw away your testing (since
> the thing you rebased on top of may have introduced semantic conflicts
> with the work in your tree).  If you don't rebase your tested tree, any
> conflicts are then restricted to the actual merge and can be fixed there
> (or at least the diagnosis will lead there).
> 
> So, if I was a maintiner, at the start of the merge window (or just
> before) I would create a test branch that contained my work plus a
> *merge* with Linus' tree and do some testing on that and then ask Linus
> to pull my tree (not the merged version).  It may prove that the test
> merge with Linus' tree produces an "interesting" syntactic conflict - in
> this case I would mention that to Linus and put the merged tree somewhere
> public for him to use as a guide.  (Mind you, this conflict would already
> have most likely been noted by the linux-next maintainer.)
> 
> Also, your testing may have brought to light a semantic conflict, in
> which case the fix could be supplied to Linus with the pull request, or a
> well changed logged back merge of Linus' tree containing the fix could be
> done and Linus asked to pull the result.

Thanks for the tip.  I certainly retested after doing the rebase to
v3.7, but I can see the point.  I'll do as you suggest, a merge on a
separate branch for testing only and tag what I currently have in my
next branch.  v2 forthcoming.  Thanks,

Alex