From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752787Ab2GZRO1 (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:14:27 -0400 Received: from mail-wg0-f44.google.com ([74.125.82.44]:35946 "EHLO mail-wg0-f44.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752060Ab2GZROY (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:14:24 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <5010A6FE.7000604@pobox.com> References: <20120725203551.GA19762@havoc.gtf.org> <20120725204350.GA20530@havoc.gtf.org> <50107297.305@pobox.com> <50107A0D.3060003@pobox.com> <5010A6FE.7000604@pobox.com> From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:14:03 -0700 X-Google-Sender-Auth: ExHvistoMXa5RHhMqR5ABbdcamI Message-ID: Subject: Re: [git patches] libata updates To: Jeff Garzik Cc: Andrew Morton , linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, LKML Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 7:10 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: > > Thanks, so noted. I guess if the merge gets more complex than something > easily described in an email, that implies that maintainers should do more > cross-coordination and maybe a merge tree. It's fairly rare. It happens mostly with the arch trees for some reason - the ARM tree used to be an unholy mess. And then we have the small "oops, we didn't even notice" things when some driver (or FS) interface changes, and we have a new driver/fs or just extended an old one, and there's a subtle conflict. And people miss those, and quite frankly, it's not a huge deal. We can fix it up later. It's the "oh, I knew about this" cases where it's fixed up as a separate commit I dislike. And quite frankly, I really do a lot of merges, and over the history of git we have not had all that many really complicated ones. I commonly send people email saying "ok, this clashed, you need to double-check my merge", but it's not common that they are really problems. So to a first approximation, I'd actually prefer that submaintainers not care *at*all* about whether something clashes upstream or not. If there are consistent and problematic clashes, that implies some deeper problem, and the solution to that is not "let's pre-merge", but rather more along the lines of "we're doing something wrong, maybe our interfaces are crap, or our modularity is wrong, let's think about it". And for subsystems where we have had problems, it's actually really nice if the maintainer sends me the unmerged "this is the work I've done" tree, and then perhaps has a separate "xyzzy-merged" branch that has a pre-merged version. For cases like that, I will do the merge myself, but I'll actually double-check my merge against the maintainer merge. And it's happened more than once that my merge has differed, and _my_ merge is the correct one. The maintainer may know his code better, but I know my merging. I do a ton of them. For example, this week I've done 66 merges, and 15 of them had conflicts. Of the 15, only two were interesting iirc, but even those weren't really "problematic", they were just enough to trigger me to send out emails to the maintainers about them. And I don't think your libata merge would really have merited even that, apart from the small semantic thing (which would also have been trivial with a oneliner "heads up, check out the semantic change in xyz.c:abcdef()". > What's the best way for libata to move forward, now that this hideous merge > has been pushed out to the Well Known libata branches? The > pre-jgarzik-merge commit you would have pulled is > dc7f71f486f4f5fa96f6dcf86833da020cde8a11 had my pull request been proper. I'll take your merge, it's not like it's a huge problem. What I care most about is the "flow", and I am making a stink just so that this doesn't become a common issue. We have tons of ugly history, and I'm not black-and-white - problems happen. Big deal. I just want to make sure that they don't become systemic. Linus