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

John W. Linville
2008-02-12T17:35:23Z

On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 11:31:48AM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> David Miller wrote:
>> I rebase my tree all the time, at least once or twice per
>> week. Why?

<snip>

> FWIW, that is annoying and painful for us downstream jobbers, since it
> isn't really how git was meant to be used. You use it more like a patch
> queue, where commits are very fluid.

<snip>

> I understand the desire to want a nice and clean history, but the frequency
> here really has a negative impact on your downstreams.

FWIW, I definitely have a (vocal minority) group of contributors
who resent all the rebasing. There may be a few cases of 'vanity'
represented here, but there are definitely reasonable complaints about
not being able to do simple pulls to stay up-to-date and/or having
to rebase before they can send patches to me. FWIW, I think it might
save a bit of my time as well, although I have become pretty good and
"riding the tide" of rebasing... :-(

Unfortunately, I don't have any good suggestions to remedy the issue.
One strategy might be a third layer of trees, e.g.:

net-2.6 fixes for the current release
net-2.6.26 updates certain to go to the next release
net-2.6.26-maybe updates that might not make it to the next release

Of course, managing what goes moves-up from -maybe is probably a big
headache, and just sucks-up more of Dave's time. And, of course,
virtually no one will run the -maybe tree...

Just my $0.02...

John
--
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com