Subject: Re: linux-next: build failure after merge of the driver-core tree

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:22:26 +1100

On Mon, 2014-03-17 at 18:21 -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> So, looked at the failed code.  The only necessary change seems to be
> calling device_remove_file_self() in dump_ack_store() and then doing
> kobject_put() directly afterwards, which would have been completely
> fine as a merge fix patch.

Ok. Since there's no merge error, I'll have to tell Linus explicitly to
apply it during the merge. I've never done that before but I suppose
it's doable.

> Just to be clear, I'm not necessarily against reverting the removal of
> the API.  The removal was based on the speculation that this isn't
> likely to cause trouble.  The speculation was perfectly reasonable but
> being a speculation it failed, so we take actions to remedy that and
> we *do* want to do things that way.  Reverting the removal can sure be
> one choice but the way that choice is being made here seems completely
> wrong to me.  There's no technical evaluation whatsoever.  I'd really
> hate to work in an environment where taking active trade off is
> discouraged replaced with blind policy enforcement.

Sorry I don't understand. Reverting the removal until after -rc1 (or
later in the merge window) is the easiest path from my perspective and
ensure no bisection breakage but whatever Linus prefers works here.

I don't think it's a drastic action or anything like that. It can
trivially be re-applied once the merge window has settled. But I'm happy
to also just send Linus a "apply this as a merge fixup" patch if he's
happy with the method (as I said, I've never done that before on
something that doesn't have an actual merge conflict to begin with)

Cheers,
Ben.