From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from sj-iport-6.cisco.com ([171.71.176.117]:31004 "EHLO sj-iport-6.cisco.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753929AbYBLRiw (ORCPT ); Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:38:52 -0500 Subject: Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-)) References: <20080211203146.3d28d1a0@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <20080212044314.GA4888@kroah.com> <20080211211751.3e265754@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <20080211.221126.230471463.davem@davemloft.net> <47B1CB08.4020101@garzik.org> From: Roland Dreier Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:38:40 -0800 In-Reply-To: (Linus Torvalds's message of "Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:09:34 -0800 (PST)") Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-arch-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Jeff Garzik , David Miller , arjan@infradead.org, greg@kroah.com, sfr@canb.auug.org.au, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-next@vger.kernel.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org > The other is that once somebody says "ok, I *really* need to cause this > breakage, because there's a major bug or we need it for fundamental reason > XYZ", then that person should > > (a) create a base tree with _just_ that fundamental infrastructure change, > and make sure that base branch is so obviously good that there is no > question about merging it. I don't disagree with this, but I think I should point out that making something "obviously good" may be pretty hard. It's clearly a common case that the infrastructure change goes through several rounds of change -- perhaps prompted by exposure in -mm that shows a subtle issue. So then if all other maintainers based their trees on this tree, we're left with two not-so-great alternatives: 1) merge the original, broken infrastructure change into your (Linus's) tree, leaving a known problem for bisecters to trip over. 2) rebase the world. I don't know if there's really a perfect answer here. I hope that tree-wide infrastructure breakage is uncommon enough that we can just handle these issues "by hand" as they come up. - R.