Re: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans

Jeff Garzik
2006-09-22T16:29:36Z

NOTE: Your mailer generates bogus Mail-Followup-To headers, and you
snipped rmk from the To/CC.

Dave Jones wrote:
> Hmm. Some trees do seem to get pulled more often than others.
> Linus, is there a upper limit on the number of times you want
> to see pull requests? It strikes me as odd, so I'm wondering
> if there are some crossed wires here.

Not speaking for Linus, but in general it seems like the more pull
requests you send (within reason), the more pulls that occur. Russell
and DaveM certainly seem to send frequent, successful pull requests.

> Has Andrew commented on why this is proving to be more of a problem?
> I've done regular rebases of cpufreq/agpgart (admittedly, they don't
> reject hardly ever unless Len has ACPI bits touching cpufreq) without
> causing too much headache.

Rebasing _inevitably_ causes more headaches than a simple tree update,
for any downstream consumer of your tree(s). It is best to avoid wanton
rebasing.

Think about it: if someone is pulling and merging your tree, all of a
sudden, without warning, the entire hash history is rewritten. So
rather than a Nice and Friendly minor update, the next time they pull
your stuff, the downstream user is forced to suffer through either (a) a
painful merge, or (b) back out your last tree (ugh!) and redo things
from scratch.

Rebasing might make a pretty history, but it is _not_ fun for random
consumers of your trees. It basically punishes people for following
your tree -- not something you want to do.

Jeff