[ewg] Re: [ofa-general] ANNOUNCE ofed backports for 2.6.22 kernel bits

[Arthur Jones]

hi michael, ...

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 10:27:23AM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > - A single git reset ORIG_HEAD recovers from a conflicting merge
> > 
> > handling conflicts is a big part of a maintainer's job!
> 
> Because you are a driver maintainer.
> That's what's different here from regular merge.
> Please understand: we have upstream code and we have changes against it.

i am a driver maintainer, but i'm also maintaining
the ipath release which is OFED + qlogic specific
stuff.  i know the process that you go through to
make a release.  i've lived it now for 2 releases
of ipath software.

> Upstream code is golden. If some patch conflicts with it,
> it is always this patch that needs to be fixed.
> And I want to ability to bounce that job to patch author -
> I simply do not know enough about e.g. ehca.

i agree, non-trivial merges should be bounced
to the patch author -- nothing about using backport
branches prevents or even makes this more difficult,
in fact, i have found it to be easier in git than
in dealing w/ patches because the environment where
the changes need to be made is much more comfortable
(git rather than quilt or some random patch stack)...

> > also, if the upstream
> > changes touch code that conflicts with a backport
> > patch, you get to fix the problem as it happens
> 
> That's exactly the thing that I do not want to do.

you don't want to know about a problem a patch
until days or weeks later when the auto build
keeps failing and you don't know why?  it is
easy to catch many problems _before_ the build
check fails...

arthur