Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Distribution kernel bugzillas considered harmful

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 18:12:01 +0200,
Mark Brown wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 09:43:08AM -0400, Martin K. Petersen wrote:
> 
> > 1. I could just always revert instead of dropping the patches. The
> >    downside is that we end up with a pretty messy history because, as I
> >    pointed out above, it's usually a matter of dropping tens of patches
> >    at a time and not reverting a single offending commit. In addition,
> >    having a messy history makes it harder on distro kernel people to
> >    track driver updates.
> 
> I used to deal with this by using topic branches heavily and making my
> -next be an automated merge of those branches, if something went badly I
> could just throw away the branch.  I stopped for a while because Linus
> didn't like the number of branches I was creating, though it wasn't a
> problem with the approach in general.

I think that the topic branch approach would work well if you merge
topic branches back to the main branch more often.  That is, each
topic branch lives only for a relatively short time (e.g. a few
weeks), and not merging the whole branches in a shot at the end of the
development cycle.

Basically the merge to the main branch "fixates" the developments of
the given topic, hence other people can start working on the commits
safely.  Meanwhile the not-yet-merged branches can be still thrown
away if they are really bad.


Takashi