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

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

> > > 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...

I don't work this way.

I just just apply all patches before pushing out.
And I see *immediately* the patch that conflicts - unlike merge
conflict where I will know which file conflicts but not
which change created the conflict.

And if a patch conflicts with upstream code,
an option to move the patch aside and defer
the merge decision to patch author
is very important to me: this just happened
with ehca backport and update to 2.6.23-rc1.
I do not want to delay update to 2.6.23-rc1 until
IBM can be bothered to update their backport.

Yes, this means that the specific module won't
build on a specific kernel until the conflict
is resolved. But there are multiple conflicts and each
needs to be resolved by another person.

-- 
MST