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

Linus Torvalds
2008-02-12T18:38:23Z

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Benny Halevy wrote:
>
> IMHO, this base tree should typically be based off of linus' tree
> and kept rebased on top of it. This way you get the mainline fixes
> through the integration base tree.

Hell no!

No rebasing! If people rebase, then it's useless as a base.

That base tree needs to be something people can *depend* on. It contains
the API changes, and not anything else. Otherwise I will never ever pull
the resulting mess, and you all end up with tons of extra work.

Just say *no* to rebasing.

Rebasing is fine for maintaining *your* own patch-set, ie it is an
alternative to using quilt. But it is absolutely not acceptable for
*anythign* else.

In particular, people who rebase other peoples trees should just be shot
(*). It's simply not acceptable behaviour. It screws up the sign-off
procedure, it screws up the people whose code was merged, and it's just
WRONG.

Linus

(*) The exception being if there is something seriously wrong with the
tree. I think I've had trees which I just refused to pull, and while most
of the time I just say "I refuse to pull", early on in git development I
actually ended up fixing some of those trees up because my refusal was due
to people mis-using git in the first place. So I have actually effectively
rebased a maintainer tree at least once. But I still think it is seriously
screwed up.