Subject: Re: How to debug linux-next?

From: Takashi Iwai <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:58:46 +0200

At Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:41:11 +0200,
Nico -telmich- Schottelius wrote:
> 
> > > - And would a non-rebased tree not make life much easier for debugging
> > >   purposes?
> > 
> > I don't know.  What it would do is produce a lot more merge conflicts as
> > patches are moved around, changed, removed etc on a daily basis.
> 
> The only issue I see is with rewritten patches. Otherwise git-merge
> should detect already applied patches and without git I see
> git-format-patch and git-am as quite strong tools.
> 
> I must confess, that I _really_ like the idea of doing
> git-fetch && git-merge linux-next, so git-bisect works
> for all versions.

I also would love to have a continuous git tree, but I guess it's
pretty hard for linux-next after some time.  git-merge doesn't always
track rebased trees perfectly, and we have also quilt trees in
addition.  Moreover, sometimes some subtrees have to be dropped
temporarily for fatal conflicts.

One thing I think sometimes useful is a record of HEAD of each merged
tree in a file, say, Next/heads.  Then you can see what changes have
been done in each subtree more easily.

BTW, you can try to merge the tree by yourself.  For example, starting
from next-20080729, merge next-20080730, resolve conflicts manually,
and go next to 20080731.  It seems working with a relatively small
number of conflicts for a few days difference.

Takashi