Re: [patch 04/16] Without this patch at least IBM VisualAge C 5.0 (I have 5.0.2) on AIX 5.1 fails to compile git.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 28, 2010, 16:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20100428162324.GB7527@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <4BD7F81A.4030906@spacetec.no>

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 10:55:54AM +0200, Tor Arntsen wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> >> The patch is against master. Are we supposed to make patches against
> >> master or maint? (I thought I saw the latter somewhere. I'm pretty
> >> new in here though..)
> [...]
> Ok. That would correspond to master from git anyway. I make my patches
> against a git checkout, and I was just throwing out the question to
> the general audience, for my own knowledge.

The answer is that you should base your patch on whatever is the best place for Junio to apply it. :)

For new feature work that will go into the next 3-number release (e.g., 1.7.1), that should generally just go on 'master'.

For bugfixes that will be part of stable release (e.g., 1.7.0.7), they should generally go right on top of the commit introducing the bug, and can then be merged into whichever versions exhibit the bug. If it's not a bugfix but rather a documentation or portability fix that should go to maint, and doesn't necessarily have a specific commit to based on, building on 'maint' is probably OK, which would be appropriate for the next stable release. There is some benefit to going farther back if the fix should be merged to multiple maint tracks (e.g., both 1.6.6.x and 1.7.0.x). I'm not sure how Junio decides which maint releases are "too old" to care about.

It's almost never a good idea to base work on "next" as a whole. It is appropriate to base work on commits on a topic that is _in_ next, but only if you are building on to that topic. Otherwise, we try to keep topics independent (by building them on "master") so that they can be merged independently as they mature.

For this particular patch set, "master" is probably a good starting point. Portability fixes can often go to maint as described above, but this particular patchset is more like feature work. It's big and invasive, and it is not about fixing minor portability issues introduced by recent commits, but rather is about porting to many brand new platforms.

-Peff