Subject: linux-next procedures: (Was: Re: linux-next: manual merge of the driver-core tree with the tracing tree)

From: Stephen Rothwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 15:13:56 +1000

Hi all,

[Greg, this is not directed only at you, but is a wider issue and you
have given me the opportunity to dicsuss it].

On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:22:56 -0700 Greg KH <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 03:01:15PM +1000, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> >
> > [Aside:  the first I can find of this is the patch submission to LKML
> > within the last day ... so "posted, reviewed, unit tested"?  I assume
> > this has had some discussion somewhere, but Google doesn't know where.]
> 
> It was posted today for discussion, which didn't seem to happen.

That was my point - waiting less than a day between the posting of a new
feature publicly and its inclusion in linux-next seems a bit impatient.
*And* you seem to have gotten some discussion now :-).

> It has been unit tested a lot in SuSE's kernels with review from our
> kernel developers (hence the 3 signed-off-bys).   We use it to speed up
> booting a lot because we have to use an initramfs (like all distros need
> to for various reasons.)  It aleviates the udev coldplug issues a lot,
> and the embedded developers have been very happy to see this (for some
> reason they only like writing private emails, not to the list, which is
> unfortunate.)

Having seen what is coming in this patch for linux-next on Monday it is
clear that there is more work to be done on this before it is ready for
Linus' tree.  linux-next is for integration testing, it is not a
development tree.  Everything in it should, in the tree maintainers
opinion, be ready for Linus' tree (if he happens to go insane and open
the merge window unexpectedly).  I am making no comment about this
particular feature, just what should be in the linux-next tree.

I would expect maintainers to have (at least) three (publicly available)
trees (where "tree" can be a quilt (sub)series, or a git branch etc):
development, ready and bug-fixes.  Development is ongoing work and new
features, not yet ready for Linus' tree. Ready is pretty much done - it
may not be bug free, but it is (as far as is reasonably possible) tested
and ready to go into Linus' tree. Bug-fixes is the stuff for Linus after
the merge window closes.

Maybe I have not made this clear enough in the past, but linux-next
should really (except for a couple of clear exceptions like "staging")
only contain the ready and bug-fixes trees.

Discussion, anyone?  I am open to changes if people think things should
be run differently, but the above makes sense to me.
-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell                    [email-masked]
http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~sfr/