Re: [GIT PULL] EDAC updates for v6.4

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 12:28 AM Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:
>
> For some stupid reason (juggling gazillion things at the same time,
> probably) I have based the edac-amd64 branch *not* ontop of plain
> v6.3-rc3 but there are a couple more of your merges ontop.

It's fine. Mistakes happen, and honestly, the "base your work on top
of a stable point" is - like almost everything else in life - a
recommendation for everybody's sanity, rather than any kind of
black-and-white rule.

And it comes mainly from people actively mis-using git, and merging
random upstream state without thought, and trying to set that kind of
behavior right, and have people _think_ about it.

IOW, it's not some "this gets enforced" thing - it's more of a "you
did something else horribly wrong, so let's clarify what the 'good
thoughtful git behavior' should be".

Sometimes starting at a random point can even be a feature - random
cleanups that depend on some helper that was added last release, and
it's just much more convenient to start at point X ratherr than wait
for the next -rc.

Now, the thing I do hope that people actively try to avoid is picking
a "kernel of the day" during the merge window to start on, but even
that is less about "well-defined starting point" and more about just
the fact that the merge window kernel *can* be really unstable and is
a really bad base.

But some "rc3+" kernel is certainly not that kind of _horribly_ bad
kernel to start at. It's probably better than starting at a rc1
release in practice.

So the "try to use a reasonably stable starting point" really is a
general recommendation, and mostly a reaction against people who tend
to do more of a mindless "rebase/merge to today's kernels without any
thought" kind of workflow.

So I'm not asking for surgical precision. I'm asking for "reasonable
workflow", where people avoid doing pointlessly silly things.

                 Linus