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Re: "Contributors never merge" and preserving history

From
JGJohn Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Date
Feb 26, 2008, 14:04 UTC
Message-ID
<slrnfs8749.prc.jgoerzen@katherina.lan.complete.org>
In-Reply-To
<alpine.LFD.1.00.0802251202380.14934@woody.linux-foundation.org>
On 2008-02-25, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
[ snip ]
> So the reason you should generally pull from downstream rather than 
> upstream is that it keeps your development branch "focused" or "on target" 
> or whatever you want to call it. And that's always a good idea, because 
> now anybody who works together with you knows what he is getting.
Hi Linus,

Thank you very much for these two informative messages. I think that there were a lot of shades of gray to the kernel workflow that I failed to appreciate before, for whatever reason.

I do have a question about the point you make above though. I'm not quite understanding what you're saying here. Technically speaking, the end result of a merge where you pulled from me would be identical to a merge where I pulled from you. Moreover, say I'm pretty far down on the seniority list, kernel-wise. Do you expect subsystem maintainers to honor a request from me to pull from my tree, even if they've never heard of me before, or would you think they'd only want git format-patch output?

I ask because let's say I follow that advice above, and there are some "downstreams" to me. I pull from them, which involves some merging, and then I want to format-patch. It seems format-patch doesn't work so well with merging. What would I then do in this situation? Should I just use rebase to merge unless I know for sure that upstream will honor a pull request? But then again, we get into trouble if one of my downstreams did a merge.

-- John
Previous: Linus TorvaldsNext: Linus Torvalds
Message 5 of 6 in “"Contributors never merge" and preserving history”
  1. John GoerzenFeb 25, 2008
  2. Linus TorvaldsFeb 25, 2008
  3. Asheesh LaroiaFeb 25, 2008
  4. Linus TorvaldsFeb 25, 2008
  5. John GoerzenFeb 26, 2008
  6. Linus TorvaldsFeb 26, 2008

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