On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 09:09:34AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > I also don't think rebasing helps the particular problem under discussion > (ie conflicts due to having to sort out dependencies between different > trees), and in some ways hurts it.
How do you suggest that we fix the problems we had with the initial merge with the ARM tree. We were in the situation where, had I asked you to pull my tree, you'd have had a fair number of conflicts to resolve - I tested this by trying to merge your tree into my 'devel' head. The result wasn't pleasant - even I didn't know how to fix up a lot of those conflicts, so the only way I could move forward was to reconstruct the 'devel' head (which is just merges of other branches) omitting the problem branches. This then posed something of a problem - of which I saw three solutions: 1. ask the original authors of changes in those problem branches to come up with patches or fixes in their git trees (in the rare case that they have git trees) to bring the branch into line with the conflicting changes in mainline. The resulting branch with that change applied probably won't build, which means bisect pain for people who happen to bisect to that point. 2. botch the merge, publish the tree, and then hit heads together to try and get the problem resolved - again resulting in a commit point (the merge) which is nonsense and unbuildable. 3. rebase the branch on top of the conflicting change, throw out the patches which prove to be a problem and ask the original author of those patches to fix them up for the conflicting change. The result is a completely bisectable tree. (3) is the solution which I chose, and it worked _extremely_ well. (3) is effectively what akpm does with his tree - when a patch conflicts with other changes, he throws the changes out and bangs peoples heads together to get a new set of patches generated which work together. In that respect, it's no different, and it's been proven there to work well. So I see git as being no different. -- Russell King Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ maintainer of: -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
