Re: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans

Linus Torvalds
2006-09-22T16:24:56Z

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, 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.

I personally prefer to not see _too_ many pull requests, since that to me
indicates that people don't take advantage of the distributed nature of
git, and don't let things "simmer" in their own tree for a while.

[ Side note, just to explain how I personally work: getting too many
requests about the same tree confuses and sometimes irritates me, since
I tend to "batch up" my work. For example, for the last couple of days,
I've been mostly in "discussion mode", and have been talking about
licenses and workflow issues etc.

And then at some point (probably later today) I decide to go into "merge
mode" and go back to old mails I ignored and start applying them and
pulling from other peoples git trees. And so if my "mode switching" has
a longer latency than the "please pull" frequency, I end up seeing two
requests for the same tree during the same "merge mode" thing, which
just means that when I look at the older one, it no longer matches what
is in the tree I'm pulling from.

I've long done this "batching" thing - it's something I eventually
worked out with my patch-flow with Alan, and that I think we've
perfected with Andrew (probably largely _because_ we worked it out with
Alan after a certain amount of friction ;).

I personally at least _feel_ like I'm more efficient when I can just
completely switch gears, rather than having a constant trickle of
different things happening.

Hopefully that explains the other side of why I prefer to not get two
pull requests for the same tree within days of each other - I may simply
not even have gotten _around_ to the first one yet, and then the second
one just irritates me. ]

For example, I think that project maintainers should to some degree just
talk about their _own_ trees, rather than try to get their changes into my
tree, and then point to that. One of the big ideas in distribution (at
least to me) is that I'm _not_ supposed to be the "one and only", and I
think we should aim for a situation where people who develop in certain
specific areas can interact directly with the people who are testing the
results, so that by the time I get a "please pull" request, most of the
bulk of the work should hopefully already have gone through a cycle.

And all this is not even really git-centric. It's obviously what Andrew
does with the -mm tree too - havign a certain amount of "latency" is good.

That said, the "release early, release often" thing still holds, and
letting things wait _too_ long just means that the _only_ people who test
it is some very specific group, and you may not see the problems that a
bigger environment would see.

So it's a balance between "by the time you send it on, it should hopefully
have had a day or two of testing" _and_ a "by the time you send it on you
shouldn't have forgotten the issues and think it's old and all done".

I would _personally_ judge that if you need to push me the same tree more
than once a week (not counting mistakes and brown-paper bugs that
obviously happen - I'm saying "in general" here), there's likely something
strange going on.

But at the same time, please do keep in mind thatr it's partly just a
matter of taste, and it's also very much a matter of work habits (and
about how active the tree is). Some people tend to work in certain ways.

I think rmk keeps his git trees in a private location (and I think it's
because the kernel.org maintainers asked us to not mirror things out
publicly if we didn't need to), so I think part of the reason the ARM
trees get pushed out more actively is simply because Russell has used my
tree as a "distribution point".

I don't think that's necessarily great, and there's been some friction
over it ("people are waiting for this"), but it's not been a _huge_
problem either, so I just lump it in the "different people, different ways
to work" pile..

Linus