Re: [RFC git pull] "big box" x86 changes

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sat Apr 26 2008 - 15:13:14 EST




On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> So we need a bit of help wrt. how mergable this is, and what else is
> needed to make it mergable. These changes have been booted all across
> the x86 spectrum, small and large boxes alike, so i'd be seriously
> surprised if they caused any widespread breakage.

I'd like to see this sent as perhaps four independent pulls (where
"independent" doesn't necessarily mean that they don't depend on each
other and have some ordering, but is more of a "this is the bootup
changes" vs "these are bootmem-related" etc, if at all possible.

Quite frankly, from a review standpoint, very few people should need to
(or want to) review individual commits when there are 50 of them (they
might only care about the changes that 3 or 4 of them make, but they get
lost in the noise), but at the same time, if you have a single diffstat
like this:

45 files changed, 2071 insertions(+), 362 deletions(-)

then you're also going to have people not able to give good feedback.

In contrast, if you send out an email like this one, but that has the
combined diff of say 10 commits in one area, and the diff is a couple of
hundred lines of changes rather than almost 2,500 lines, then you'll
definitely get people who are able and willing to look at four chunks like
that.

IOW, they'd be big enough that people hopefully don't start nitpicking
about some *totally* uninteresting small detail, but small enough that
people can read it through without losing concentration about a quarter of
the way in.

Linus
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