Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:21:33 -0800
Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:


> > The maintainer will be notified.  I hope to provide some clue as to
> > what the conflict is with, but probably not initially.
> > 
> > I will attempt to build the tree between each merge (and a failed
> > build will again cause the offending tree to be dropped).
> 
> This is going to get really interesting, especially when (not if) we
> do more global api changes.  Look at the last round of kobject
> changes. That touched a lot of different places, and other trees
> ended up not building because of it, because I changed apis and they
> had added new code based on the old apis.
> 
> I think the only way to fix this is not going to just "drop the tree"
> like you are suggesting, but to let both people know (the person who
> caused the change, and the person who's tree broke after the merge),
> and then either add a "fixup patch" for the build like Andrew has been
> doing, or disabling something from the build section.
> 

in my experience, the only chance you have is doing API changes as first in the set of changes,
and then hoping (making) all other trees use the new APIs. Any other order just turns into
an impossible mismash.

I can see the point of doing an LKML annouce of the new API after the series is done, so that 
all other maintainers have a chance to fix their trees (this of course is only for new occurances
of the old api showing up; the api change series should convert all existing users)

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