xiangfu liu wrote: > Hi > > we(Qi Hardware) are use openwrt as the code repos. for the kernel develop > there are four team work on the similar kernel. > > since the device use the same cpu. we want merge the four team to one > kernel. then we can help each other when develop kernel. > > we can ask other three team to use openwrt. so is there a good way to resolve > the problem? > > are you all use openwrt's patches to manage the kernel source cdoe? > > do you use git when create the openwrt patches? > > I saw there is "Use external kernel tree (NEW)" option in openwrt. is this > fit > the situation? > > we can use a git to manage the kernel, we must have one to create the > patches for openwrt? right? OpenWrt is built around the maintenance of patches, not just source trees. I agree that this can make it a bit harder to stay in sync with people that do not like to work this way, but I consider the patchsets an important step in order to maintain a series of changes that can be reviewed and merged upstream easily. The main problem with maintaining a kernel tree in git is that people tend to do incremental changes all the time, because rebasing and grouping changes causes problems for people that pull from the tree. When lots of incremental changes on the same parts of the kernel accumulate, it becomes increasingly harder to figure out which incremental changes belong together, which is very important for keeping the codebase clean. This is an issue where I think things went horribly wrong in the OpenMoko project for a while. Initially the project had maintained a patch series in svn, which was mostly usable and allowed people to cherry-pick changes. It also made it easy for OpenWrt to use this patchset to maintain a target. After a while the developers figured that it'd be easier to just keep all the changes in a git tree instead. This led to an incomprehensible mess of lots of incremental changes which were not grouped in any sensible way, thereby making it almost impossible for external projects to review and modify. There are tools to fix this in git trees, such as topgit, but I think they are not widely used yet. I personally maintain OpenWrt patches using quilt and sometimes hand-editing if necessary.
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