Re: [bk patch] Make cardbus compile in -pre4

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Fri, Feb 08, 2002 at 08:39:31PM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Feb 08, 2002  18:25 -0800, Patrick Mochel wrote:
> > (I don't have a public repository yet, so there's no place to pull form)

Read the second half below to see how to get one.

> I don't see why everyone who is using BK is expecting Linus to do a pull.

For one, he seems to like that model, if the data is in a well known
place, he can pull it when he is ready.  Makes it easy for him to not
worry about whether he has all the stuff Jeff wants to give him, pull
either says there is nothing to do or it doesn't.

The other issue is that if you do the "bk send -r+" thing, that assumes
that the receiver has the parent of the most recent change.  The patch
will not apply otherwise.  This is one difference between BK & diff/patch.
diff/patch will work in more cases, BK is insistent that the receiver has
everything that the sender had except the data sent.  So if you let Linus
pull from a known place then you know he can apply your patch using BK,
if you don't, then he might be able to apply your patch.

On to the "known place" issue.  One problem people have is having a
place to stash this stuff.  Since BK is a replicating system, you can
have the same data in lots of different places, like your laptop, your
home machine, work machine, whatever, but you need a place that other
people can pull from that is always there.  Anyone can install BK, read
the bkd man page and set up such a place.  For those people who either
don't want to do that, or don't have a place where they can run a BKD,
or they don't trust the BKD software to be secure, or whatever, we've set
up bkbits.net, it's somewhat like sourceforge but right now, at least,
mostly intended for the benefit of the kernel team.  We originally set it
up for the PPC team but anyone can stash a copy of their repository there.

To get the model, think of this as a staging area.  You don't work there,
you don't use that system to do your patches or really do very much at
all.  You work where you work right now.  Make your stuff work, test it
out, and when you are ready, push a copy of it up to bkbits.net and send
out mail.  People can go look at the changelogs, see the diffs, pull the
changes using BK, etc.  And Jeff asked for URL format that he can post 
so you can do a

	wget <URL> 

and you have the patch described in his posting.  That should keep the
non-BK users happy, in essense the BK users are adding the data and
BK may be viewed as a patchbot.  For those who don't like the license
or for whatever reason just like plain patches better, they can slurp
down the patches any time they want.

If you want to get a project space up there, send mail to
support@bitmover.com and we'll send you instructions, it's pretty easy
to set up, you log in and pick a name and add your identity.pub and
you're all set.  There is a little admin shell you can use to populate
your repository.  Then you may push your patches there and point Linus
at them and hope he pulls them.  I can see that in short order Linus
is going to be asking for the "show me everything I don't have on one
web page" tool, but that's cool, we've been meaning to build that one
for a while.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm