Re: [GIT PULL] arm64: Fixes for -rc4

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

On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 4:43 PM Will Deacon <will@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> Note that the workaround code ended up being based on -rc2, so I had a
> bit of a faff trying to generate the right diffstat for this pull request
> after merging that branch into our fixes branch based on -rc1. In the end
> I had to emulate the pull locally because I couldn't figure out how to
> drive request-pull correctly despite the shortlog being correct. I'd love
> to know what I should've done instead.

You did the right thing.

When there are multiple merge bases, a regular "git diff" doesn't work
since it's fundamentally about two end-points (well, it _can_ work
almost by mistake, but doesn't work in the general case). So the only
way to get a "proper" diff is to do a merge and then diff the result.

That said, I also accept the output of "git diff" which will then have
a lot of noise from all the _other_ work done between the two merge
bases. I can figure out what happened, and do my own two-endpoint diff
and see what happened, and still se that "yes, that's what the pull
request meant, and that's why the diffstat is garbage".

What you did is the "good quality" pull request, though.

In general, people who aren't doing fancy things with git should never
get to the "multiple merge bases" situation, and then the regular pull
request logic works fine.

And people likme you who are doing multiple branches and know what
they are doing are also able to them handle the "uhhuh, I need to do a
merge to get a good diffstat" situation.

            Linus