Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

Trond Myklebust
2008-02-12T04:46:27Z

On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 20:31 -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> in my experience, the only chance you have is doing API changes as first in the set of changes,
> and then hoping (making) all other trees use the new APIs. Any other order just turns into
> an impossible mismash.

It would be very nice to have a separate tree with _only_ API changes
that could be frozen well before Linus' merge window opens. It should be
a requirement that maintainers use this tree as a basis for testing API
changes and even test that their own changesets were properly integrated
with the changed APIs.
As it is, we tend to get the order entirely wrong: API changes typically
get merged _after_ the maintainer changes have been merged, and so no
API changes are ever really integration tested.

Cheers
Trond