Cc: Jeff Garzik <jeff@...>, David Miller <davem@...>, <arjan@...>, <greg@...>, <sfr@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, <linux-next@...>, <linux-arch@...>, <akpm@...>
> The other is that once somebody says "ok, I *really* need to cause this
> breakage, because there's a major bug or we need it for fundamental reason
> XYZ", then that person should
>
> (a) create a base tree with _just_ that fundamental infrastructure change,
> and make sure that base branch is so obviously good that there is no
> question about merging it.
I don't disagree with this, but I think I should point out that making
something "obviously good" may be pretty hard. It's clearly a common
case that the infrastructure change goes through several rounds of
change -- perhaps prompted by exposure in -mm that shows a subtle
issue. So then if all other maintainers based their trees on this
tree, we're left with two not-so-great alternatives:
1) merge the original, broken infrastructure change into your
(Linus's) tree, leaving a known problem for bisecters to trip
over.
2) rebase the world.
I don't know if there's really a perfect answer here. I hope that
tree-wide infrastructure breakage is uncommon enough that we can just
handle these issues "by hand" as they come up.
- R.
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