Re: The direction linux is taking

Olivier Galibert
2001-12-29T20:02:13Z

On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 11:37:49AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> One way to quantify this is to ask Linus, Alan, Marcelo, et al, how much
> time they spend merging, i.e., how often do they get patch rejects?
> Regardless of the answer, it will be interesting. If it is a lot,
> then the patchbot idea has marginal usefulness. If it is none at all,
> then that says development is serialized, which means we may be leaving
> a lot of progress on the floor.

I personally think the merging is distributed, and done by each
subsystem maintainer. When that doesn't happen, and the merge is
non-trivial, we often see a message by Linus essentially saying "your
patch is cool, but it conflicts with another patch by <foo> that does
<bar>, so I've done a new pre with <foo>'s patch, could you merge and
rediff against it?".

OG.