Re: [git pull] orangefs bugfixes for rc2

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 05:06:17PM -0400, Mike Marshall wrote:
> sorry to follow up my own post... perhaps we should
> point our pull requests at Al and base them on one
> of Al's trees? I'm sure all this should be easy, we're
> just clumsy 'cause we're new...

Only in cases when you depend on something in my tree.  And even then it would
be better to discuss the situation so I could put the stuff you really
need into a never-modified branch, so that both your tree and mine would
contain a merge from it.

It varies for different subsystems - e.g. all networking stuff tends to
go through the davem's tree; he pulls from submaintainers and feeds the
results to Linus.  I've no idea how he survives that kind of load and
I would certainly prefer to avoid the same role for vfs and filesystems.
IMO it's a logistical nightmare; Dave somehow manages to cope with that,
but I've no idea how to do that.

I would very much prefer to have the inter-tree dependencies minimized, as
far as vfs and filesystems are concerned.  By default I reorder the stuff
in vfs.git as I see fit; if something is needed for another tree, I prefer
to add a separate (and usually short) branch with just the required stuff
and a promise to never rebase/reorder/etc.

AFAICS, nothing in this pull request depends on anything outside of what
went into mainline just before -rc1, so I would probably just based that
branch at 4599649 and added fixes on top of that.  No need to backmerge unless
you need something that went into mainline in the meanwhile (and backmerge
in that case would better be limited to what you need - e.g. "we need the
stuff pulled into mainline from <branch> at <sha1>, so we merge that branch").

Or just base it off -rc1 - that'll give you everything that went into mainline
in given merge window...