Re: BK, deltas, snapshots and fate of -pre...

Jeff Garzik
2002-04-21T17:13:57Z

On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 12:05:27AM -0400, Alexander Viro wrote:
> "Linus documentation".
>
> /me carefully stays the hell away from discussing whether it's a part of
> documented object or not and what would be the license on said object...

A discussion on _Linus_ licensing would be interesting ;-)

To be pedantic, though, I point out that the BK doc at the center of
this flamewar is GPL'd.

> FWIW, I doubt that dropping -pre completely in favour of dayly snapshots is
> a good idea - "2.5.N-preM oopses when ..." is preferable to "snapshot YY/MM/DD
> oopses when..." simply because it's easier to match bug reports that way.
> Having all deltas downloadable as diff+comment is wonderful, but it doesn't
> replace well-defined (and less frequent) resync points.
>
> Comments?

hmmm hmmm.

My alternative suggestion, which only applies to development series
kernels, is to spit out pre-patches and releases more frequently.
The releases would be your formal testing points by users, and the
pre-patches would be the sync points for developers, and test points
for developers. i.e. make the current system work as intended ;-)

Maybe write a script for Linus that automates his side of pre-patch
publishing (if it isn't 100% automatic now)? i.e. my guess is that
pre-patching is currently automated maybe 70% or so... This automation
I describe increments the pre-patch number in the makefile, checks
that update into BK, rolls a patch, scp's it to master, and posts the
changelog to linux-kernel. I could roll a demo script that does this,
if people think this is a sane alternative.

IOW, I propose to create a "linuspush" script that replaces his current
"bk push" command. Linus pushes batches of csets out at a time,
make these cset batches the pre-patches...

Jeff, who wouldn't mind snapshots either