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

Linus Torvalds
2008-02-13T02:19:51Z

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> So it would not be efficient for David to do all this queue-cleaning
> *prior* to putting the tree into linux-next, because more stuff will pop up
> anyway.

Well, what others have done is to have special "temporary branches".

This is what git itself does, for example. The "pu" branch in git is used
for experimental stuff, and it's _declared_ to be rebased, redone, and
generally just unsafe at any moment.

So it is easy to have a special "testing" branch that is just declared to
be unsafe. Make Linux-next pull that testing branch - it will pollute the
Linux-next tree (and anybody else who just wants to see what the current
state is), but since those are re-generatd from scratch every day
_anyway_, so who cares?

But don't make it something people pull by mistake (ie never call it
"master", and when mentioning it in some email message, always mention the
fact that it's not a stable branch, and never ask anybody to pull it
without making it very clear that it's just for testing, not for real
merging).

So git does have support for those things. They are very much "secondary"
branches (any tree they are pulled into will itself become "poisoned" and
unstable), but it's easy enough to have something like that for testing
purposes. And if it all tests out fine, you can just move it as-is into
the "real" branch if you want to.

Linus