On Sat, 2008-04-26 at 13:30 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
Its worth realising that these fix patches contain useful information
too, e.g. they might be by different authors and its also interesting in
some senses to see what fixes were applied to the original patch, why
etc. since it is history and that is what the SCM effectively stores.
This is also happens on larger timescales, a commit goes into some tree,
some regression is found, some future commit fixes that regression,
sometimes over a kernel release or two or more.
My point is that this information can actually be useful and trying to
prune it all out the main tree for aesthetic reasons might not
necessarily be the right thing to do. I agree it can be distracting and
perhaps what we need are tools that can show or hide this kind of
information as an option.
Consider that -stable tree and that if commits were somehow marked as
regression fixes for previous commits, you could run some command and
get a list of regression fixes. I'm a realist and appreciate such output
would need careful manual/human consideration but it would have a real
world use.
On the other hand I agree that the patches in -mm often have stupid
typos etc which aren't interesting in the history but where do you draw
the line?
Cheers,
Richard
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