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

David Miller
2008-02-13T00:49:52Z

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:07:07 -0800 (PST)

>
>
> On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> >
> > But the "author" is still preserved, right? Why do you need the
> > committer name to be preserved? (I'm not denying that there could be
> > reasons, I'm just curious what they are.)
>
> It's not that the committer should be preserved, but:
>
> - the chain from author -> committer should be visible in the
> Signed-off-by: lines.
>
> If you rebase somebody elses tree, you screw that up. You need to add
> your sign-off, since now *you* are the new committer, and *you* took
> somebody elses work!

I agree with this and that is exactly what I screwed up by mistake
this time around.

Normally when I rebase I walk through the patches that came from other
people's trees and add signoffs as needed. I understand that this
is frowned upon to some extent as well.

> Put another way: think of the absolute *chaos* that would happen if I were
> to rebase instead of just merging. Every time I pull from you I'd
> invalidate your whole tree, and you'd have to re-generate. It gets
> unmaintainable very quickly.

I actually wouldn't mind that, the first thing I do when sending a
pull request is I stop putting things into my tree and as soon as the
recipient pulls I wipe out my tree and clone a fresh copy of their's.

It's really not a big deal. The pusher can queue patches and other
stuff up in their mailbox or in a directory somewhere. This quiet
period also allows those patches to have some time to be reviewed on
the lists before they actually end up in anyone's tree.

I really like that mode of operation.