Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] When to push bug fixes to mainline

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Sat Jul 13 2013 - 02:44:52 EST



* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:28 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > OK, just read up some more on git notes, and *both* the assumptions I
> > had made about git notes were fundamentally wrong. Not sure how well
> > they would scale, though, but stuffing metadata like additional
> > Acked-by:, Tested-by: and Cc: stable into notes seems more viable
> > after reading the spec.
>
> I really don't want to use git notes for anything that actually gets
> distributed.

Regardless of any scalability and other technical merits, allowing tags to
go into a commit log entry via git notes would IMO dilute the value of
Acked-by and Reviewed-by tags and it would actively hurt our kernel
development workflow I think.

Today there's a time limit on acking/reviewing patches: if it did not
arrive by the time the code was committed and pushed out, it does not get
into the commit log, ever. That gives people an incentive to be active
_before_ a patch gets applied.

And that's really how it should work IMO: the most important, most
critical decision point is when a patch gets applied to a tree with the
intent to send it upstream. Maintainers need the most help at that point.
Anything after that, unless it points out actual problems or room for
improvements (which will generate new commits), is not very useful.

So adding git notes after that point to add Acked-by or Reviewed-by tags
is just post facto whitewashing, ego stroking or pointless act
self-serving bureaucracy, beyond being a sign of a broken Git workflow to
begin with.

Thanks,

Ingo
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