Re: [GIT PULL] ARM MSM updates for 2.6.35-rc1

[Daniel Walker <dwalker@codeaurora.org>]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 14:27 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, Daniel Walker wrote:
> > 
> > Don't forget about this one! Or was something wrong with it?
> 
> I got a bit frustrated with ten different ARM pulls per day at one point.
> 
> There's something wrong with ARM development. The amount of pure noise in 
> the patches is incredibly annoying. Right now, ARM is already (despite me 
> not reacting to some of the flood) 55% of all arch/ changes since 2.6.34, 
> and it's all pointless churn in 
> 
> 	arch/arm/configs/
> 	arch/arm/mach-xyz
> 	arch/arm/plat-blah
> 
> and at a certain point in the merge window I simply could not find it in 
> me to care about it any more.
> 
> Do you guys at all talk about this problem? Have any of the ARM people 
> bothered to look at the arch/arm diffs and see how mind-deadening they 
> are? I try to look through these kinds of things when I pull, but after a 
> million lines of pure noise, it gets old pretty quickly.

There's room for the sub-architectures to combine stuff. I think there
is work going on to do that (at some level).

> Somehow, I can't believe that you need thousands of lines for each random 
> arch/arm/mach-xyz (yeah, some very few of them are smaller).

I'm not an authority by any means, but every time there is a new device
released (which is often) you get a new file under some mach-xyz
directory, or some large modification to an already existing file. Plus
a config file potentially. It's a little bit like the wild west, and
seems way wilder than x86 every was.

I think from the sub-architecture maintainer perspective the pain is all
hidden behind the Linus curtain , or RMK curtain or the some other
maintainer curtain. So we don't really talk about it that often. I
thought you we're totally happy with the situation ..

If you have some idea's for fixing things, I'm all ears along with my
faithful sub-architecture maintainer brothers.

Daniel