From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757540AbYEQO6b (ORCPT ); Sat, 17 May 2008 10:58:31 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755319AbYEQO6X (ORCPT ); Sat, 17 May 2008 10:58:23 -0400 Received: from www.church-of-our-saviour.ORG ([69.25.196.31]:42269 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755334AbYEQO6W (ORCPT ); Sat, 17 May 2008 10:58:22 -0400 Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 10:58:04 -0400 From: Theodore Tso To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Thomas Gleixner , LKML , Ingo Molnar , "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: [GIT pull] x86 fixes for 2.6.26 Message-ID: <20080517145802.GB6978@mit.edu> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , Linus Torvalds , Thomas Gleixner , LKML , Ingo Molnar , "H. Peter Anvin" References: <20080517015705.GA20375@mit.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.15+20070412 (2007-04-11) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@mit.edu X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 08:19:04PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Why do you consider rebasing topic branches a bad thing? > > Rebasing branches is absolutely not a bad thing for individual developers. > > But it *is* a bad thing for a subsystem maintainer. Right, but so long as a subsystem maintainer doesn't publish his/her topic branches, and only sends out patches on their topic branches for discussion via e-mail, they're fine, right? They can just rebase up until the point where the patch goes on a non-'pu' or non-'linux-next' branch. Basically, this would be the subsystem maintainer sometimes wearing an "end-point-developer" hat, and sometimes wearing a "subsystem maintainer" hat. So rebasing is fine as long as it's clear that it's happening on branches which are not meant as a base for submaintainers. I believe Junio does this himself for his own topic branches while developing git, yes? And that's probably a good reason for him not actually *publishing* any of his topic branches, and only the 'pu' branch, which is well known to be a bad idea for folks to use as a branch point, since it is constantly getting rebased. > And I realize that the x86 tree doesn't do git merges from other > sub-maintaines of x86 stuff, and I think that's a problem waiting to > happen. It's not a problem as long as Ingo and Thomas are on the net every > single day, 12 hours a day, and respond to everything. But speaking from > experience, you can try to do that for a decade, but it won't really work. > > I've talked to Ingo about this a bit, and I'm personally fairly convinced > that part of the friction with Ingo has been that micro-management on a > per-patch level. I should know. I used to do it myself. And I still do it, > but now I do it only for really "core" stuff. So now I get involved in > stuff like really core VM locking, or the whole BKL thing, but on the > whole I try to be the anti-thesis of a micro-manager, and just pull from > the submaintainers. Heh, can't really argue with your point here. - Ted