On 11/05/12 07:43, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
On Fri, 2012-05-11 at 07:14 +0800, Andy Green wrote:If
the current one performs best and is on a random HEAD commit, we certainly shouldn't wind it backwards to last -rc that performs worse just because that's "easier to communicate".
I agree, I wasn't envisioning winding backwards, more that we stop winding forwards at a chosen -rc, or stop merging topics on a Friday, bring the common tree up-to-date with the weekends Torvalds -rc, then build, test and fix this ready for Linaro RC on the Friday.
Right... the problem with that would have been though that on a random day - and Linaro's monthly release cycle is random for tracking - our tracking may be dead. Right now I have local tracking tree that's considerably ahead of last public push but OMAP4 boot dies in a novel and cool way we didn't get to the bottom of yet.
We have good local-to-LT reasons for having got ourselves into that situation, we took in 70 patches from TI that are fixes or improvements to core support we want to have in for 3.4. That reasoning might occur the day or week before this Linaro monthly release and we should again choose to temporarily trash the tree. Sometimes, we get demand to hold tracking for other reasons again asynchronous to monthly release.
In short monthly release action will have to make do with "last thing that was working best" as a single LT tree and for unified "last unified build that was working best for most trees", which sometimes might be weeks old. To facilitate the single LT case we are tagging our pushes we believe are worth something, even if they might go backwards sometimes as we integrate new drops of stuff.
For ARM LT the situation is a bit simpler, you have largely parallel feature trees with new - super valuable, don't get me wrong - content, in our case we have 1,000 - 2,000 patches with conflicting content to definitive stuff pouring in to mainline all the time. We usually can't do any special planning to converge with the monthly release. (Nor will it get better in medium term, 3.5 has a huge convulsion in hwmod coming that might send us back to the Stone Age for a while)
-Andy