Re: linux-next requirements

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> wrote:

> Hi Ingo,
> 
> On Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:14:05 +0100 Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> >
> > > [...]  As long as that's the case, linux-next should build on them too.
> > 
> > No, and IMO linux-next is clearly over-interpreting this bit. Linux is not 
> > supposed to build on all architectures. Maybe that's a core bit of a 
> > misunderstanding (on either my or on sfr's side) and it should be clarified 
> > ...
> 
> Well, we have no real problem then.  The only architectures for which a 
> failure will stop new stuff getting into linux-next are the ones I 
> personally build while constructing the tree (x86, ppc and sparc).  Once 
> something is in linux-next, even if it causes a build failure overnight, I 
> am loath to remove it again as it can cause pain for Andrew (who bases -mm 
> on linux-next).

Ok - very good. This has apparently been relaxed some time ago, i know 
linux-next used to be more stringent.

> I will still report such failures (if I have time to notice them - I mostly 
> hope that architecture maintainers will have a glance over the build results 
> themselves) and others do as well but such failures do not generally cause 
> any actions on my part (except in rare cases I may actually fix the problem 
> or put a provided fix patch in linux-next).

Yeah. Plus it's never black and white - sometimes a rare arch will show some 
real crappiness in a commit. So we want to know all bugs.

> I would like to add arm to the mix of the architectures I build during 
> construction, but there is no wide ranging config that builds for arm and 
> building a few of the configs would just end up taking too much time.

Yeah, ARM is clearly important from a usage share POV IMHO, and it's also 
actively driving many areas of interest.

It's also a bit difficult to keep ARM going because there's so many 
non-standardized hw variants of ARM, so i'm sure the ARM folks will appreciate 
us not breaking them ...

( Alas, ARM doesnt tend to be a big problem, at least as far as the facilities 
  i'm concerned about go: it has implemented most of the core kernel 
  infrastructures so there's few if any 'self inflicted' breakages that i can 
  remember. )

> Thanks for clarifying.

Thanks,

	Ingo