Re: bisecting with wireless-testing

["John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com>]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:34:16AM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> Renaming subject and adding linux-wireless.
> 
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:58:09AM -0700, John W. Linville wrote:

> > It should not be necessary to bisect through reverts.  I maintain
> > different tags for such purposes.
> >
> > Always use the lastest merge-* tag as the base for bisection.
> > This should be equivalent to whichever -rc release from Linus is the
> > current base for wireless-testing.  If you need to go any earlier
> > than that, you should be using linux-2.6.
> >
> > So for example with current tree:
> > 
> >         git bisect start
> >         git bisect bad master-2009-08-19
> >         git bisect good merge-2009-08-14
> > 
> > This should include all of the current wireless patches in
> > wireless-testing but not in the base linux-2.6 kernel.
> 
> This does indeed help alot. Just to be clear let me provide an
> example. So say git tag -l | grep merge | tail -3 yields:
> 
> merge-2009-07-24
> merge-2009-08-03
> merge-2009-08-14
> 
> I believe what you are indicating if you are bisecting using to avoid
> running into the reverts you'd have to ensure then that you bisect between
> a bad commit and the next dated merge tag. So if you ran into a snag say
> on master-2009-08-06, you should test if merge-2009-08-03 is good first,
> and if its not then consider using linux-2.6.git ? If so wouldn't
> the code on master-2009-08-06 not yet be available on linux-2.6.git?

If you look, merge-2009-08-03 is identical to 2.6.31-rc5:

	git diff merge-2009-08-03..v2.6.31-rc5

So if you have a problem in master-2009-08-06, then either the
problem exists in v2.6.31-rc5 or it is between merge-2009-08-03 and
master-2009-08-06.  (Read the tags carefully, they look similar.)

The point is, it never makes sense to use a good marker any
farther back than the most recent merge-* tag when trying to bisect
wireless-testing.  Otherwise, all the reverts and such will cause
confusion.  If the problem still exists at the most recent merge-*
tag, then the problem is in linux-2.6 and should be bisected there.

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville@tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.