Bypassing linux-next
We've had a couple of examples of that grumpiness in the 2.6.38 cycle. When Al Viro posted his first VFS pull request, linux-next maintainer Stephen Rothwell complained that this was his first sighting of that code, despite the fact that it had apparently been around for a few months. Al is known for pulling together mainline submissions at the last minute, so this sort of thing is not entirely surprising; it remains to be seen whether he can be pushed into changing his ways.
The other complaint came after the merging of the transparent huge pages patch set, which went in by way of Andrew Morton's -mm tree. Tony Luck, having discovered that the ia64 architecture no longer built in the mainline, asked:
Andrew responded that "It's taking a
while - Stephen and I are discussing a plan.
" Integrating -mm was
always going to be a bit of a challenge; linux-next is supposed to contain
code which is ready for merging into the mainline, while -mm can carry
under-development code for years. Until that gets worked out, though,
memory management developers are going to be in a bit of a difficult
position; there is no maintainer tree they can get into which feeds into
linux-next. Those developers will need to either get their own trees into
linux-next (an easy thing to do) or take the complaints when code which
lived in -mm is seen by testers for the first time when it hits the
mainline.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Development model/linux-next |
| Kernel | linux-next |
Posted Jan 20, 2011 16:34 UTC (Thu)
by kirkengaard (guest, #15022)
[Link] (1 responses)
Odd, I was of the impression that the whole point of -mm was that it let people use code and test it before it was shipped upstream. Have we deprecated that code path?
Posted Jan 20, 2011 17:42 UTC (Thu)
by nevets (subscriber, #11875)
[Link]
I guess this means that Andrew's work flow should go to linux-next and after a bit of time, that same code can go to Linus.
Bypassing linux-next
Bypassing linux-next