Re: [PATCH] tty: Remove leftover dependencies on PPC_OF

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 08:00:45AM +0100, Grant Likely wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 7:17 AM, Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net> wrote:
> > On 04/16/2015 11:01 PM, Kevin Hao wrote:
> >>
> >> On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 10:20:59PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> >>>
> >>> powerpc qemu runs fail with the current upstream kernel.
> >>> Bisect points to commit 52d996270032 ("powerpc: kill PPC_OF").
> >>> Unfortunately, that commit did not remove all instances of PPC_OF.
> >>> Practical impact is that the serial driver used by powerpc qemu
> >>> targets is no longer built into the test kernel.
> >>
> >>
> >> Sorry for the break. This is a dependency issue. The patch 213dce3c17a6
> >> ("tty: kconfig: remove the superfluous dependency on PPC_OF") has already
> >> been merged into tty-next, but still not propagate to upstream yet. I
> >> failed
> >> to reminder Michael of this when the pulling request is sent to Linus.
> >>
> >
> > Guess that explains why I don't see the breakage in linux-next.
> >
> > This kind of problem seems to be happening a lot in this commit window.
> >
> > Is there a new mechanism in place which requires splitting such series
> > into multiple parts ? Personally I preferred the "old" style, where
> > the entire series would have been handled by one maintainer, with Acks
> > from the others.
> 
> The rules haven't changed. Maintainers are doing the wrong thing. If a
> series is split up into multiple parts, then maintainers *must*
> coordinate to put the prerequisites into a single branch that can be
> merged into each branch handling it. However, it is still almost
> always better to just merge the entire series via a single tree.
> 
> Make noise whenever you see this kind of breakage because it means a
> maintainer has done the wrong thing.

Well, the maintainer needs to be _told_ that the patch that is being
sent to them shouldn't go through their tree and that it depends on
other patches, so that they can properly just ack them.

Which is what happened here, someone sent me a patch, and I applied it.
Nothing broke that I could determine, and I never got a report of
something breaking, so how am I, the maintainer, doing the wrong thing?

thanks,

greg k-h