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

Linus Torvalds
2008-02-12T18:03:38Z

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, James Bottomley wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 09:09 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > (a) create a base tree with _just_ that fundamental infrastructure change,
> > and make sure that base branch is so obviously good that there is no
> > question about merging it.
>
> The problem is how do we use a? Usually we need to track your -rc tree
> as our fixes go in ... some of which affect our development trees.

So?

> If we stick with (a) as the base, we don't get to pull in the fixes in
> your tree. If we use your tree we have to pull in (a) creating n
> different merge points for the n different upstream trees..

I don't understand what you mean. This is true whether you pulled (a) or
not. If you have any changes what-so-ever in your tree, if you pull in
fixes from my tree, you'll get a merge.

But if you mean that you cannot rebase (a), then yes. That was what I
said. Rebases *do*not*work* (and fundamentally cannot work) in a
distributed environment.

But why would you merge with my tree in the first place? My tree won't
normally have any conflicts or anything like that anyway.

With a "Linux-next" tree, you'll see the conflicts if they occur (since
*that* tree would merge!), and in that case you would say "now I need to
merge Linus' tree just to resolve the conflicts!"

But before that, merging my tree (or rebasing on top of it) is simply
*wrong*. It has nothing to do with your SCSI development.

> Yes, this is effectively what I did with the post merge SCSI tree.
> However, if you do this rebasing becomes a fact of life because you need
> to rebase out all the dependencies you have before you merge (in fact,
> it's a good way of checking whether your dependencies have been merged
> yet or not, seeing what survives a rebase).

I don't see the logic. You shouldn't need to rebase at all. I don't see
why you claim that this makes rebasing more of a fact. It doesn't. It has
no impact at all, except making rebasing _less_ possible!

Linus