> The other is that once somebody says "ok, I *really* need to cause this > breakage, because there's a major bug or we need it for fundamental reason > XYZ", then that person should > > (a) create a base tree with _just_ that fundamental infrastructure change, > and make sure that base branch is so obviously good that there is no > question about merging it.
I don't disagree with this, but I think I should point out that making something "obviously good" may be pretty hard. It's clearly a common case that the infrastructure change goes through several rounds of change -- perhaps prompted by exposure in -mm that shows a subtle issue. So then if all other maintainers based their trees on this tree, we're left with two not-so-great alternatives: 1) merge the original, broken infrastructure change into your (Linus's) tree, leaving a known problem for bisecters to trip over. 2) rebase the world. I don't know if there's really a perfect answer here. I hope that tree-wide infrastructure breakage is uncommon enough that we can just handle these issues "by hand" as they come up. - R. -- 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/