Re: Linux 2.6.11.1

Jeff Garzik
2005-03-05T17:59:03Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
>>Yup, BK could definitely handle that...
>
>
> However, it's also true that the thing BK is _worst_ at is cherry-picking
> things, and having a collection of stuff where somebody may end up vetoing
> one patch and saying "remove that one".

In general, I agree. Andrew and I mentioned this to BitMover recently
[though its certainly not a new comment], when they asked us why I had
to occasionally blow away the netdev-2.6 tree, and reconstitute it from
scratch.

> I love BK, but what BK does well is merging and maintaining trees full of
> good stuff. What BK sucks at is experimental stuff where you don't know
> whether something should be eventually used or not.

I use BitKeeper to maintain such a tree, "libata-dev". Most stuff in
there will go upstream. Some stuff may never go upstream. Some stuff
needs to simmer for a while before going upstream. So "change streams"
get divided up locally:

[jgarzik@pretzel libata-dev]$ ls -FC
adma/ atapi-enable/ janitor/ remove-one-fix/
adma-mwi/ bridge-detect/ passthru/ sata-sil-irq/
ahci-msi/ chs-support/ pdc2027x/ tf-cleanup/
ahci-tf-read/ ioctl-get-identity/ pdc20619/ via-6421/
iomap/ promise-sata-pata/

and then I cherrypick from that.

netdev-2.6 queue is maintained the same way. It's simply a merge tree
composed of 40+ individual trees, all merged together.

Jeff