On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Lorenzo Pieralisi wrote:
Hi Nicolas,
I noticed that a merge of Grant's ARM DT patches stack into linaro-stable is on the cards and this is good news.
Yes. Even if the DT patches are not yet guaranteed to go into mainline, I'm willing to merge them sooner in the hope of breaking the chicken and egg problem we're currently facing.
I have a couple of questions on linaro-next though.
I think it is supposed to track mainline closely, and on this I'd ask your thoughts please since it does not seem to be so at present.
Right, it is lagging behind at present.
It could be nice for us to have a development kernel to base our work against in order to get the latest mainline goodness (and to have a current base to test/develop patches coming from different git dev trees that are not in the mainline yet), but still trying to consolidate code for future linaro stable releases.
To that effect, I produced a new "stable" branch: linux-linaro-2.6.36. The core code is still 2.6.36 but most of the latest ARM specific bits and a few drivers to be found in 2.6.37-rc1 were merged into it.
To sum it up, I am just asking you what are your plans for the linaro-next tree and the operating mode we should aim for.
I'm still wondering about that myself at the moment. Obviously, the linaro-next is _not_ a good base for development. This is not a stable tree but rather a merge tree which is trashed and rebuilt from scratch every so often. It is therefore only useful for testing purposes. I'm therefore asking the question if it is actually useful, and if people did use it in the past. If not then I could probably spend my time on other tasks.
The alternative I'm contemplating, which came after the decision to merge DT patches in the Linaro "stable" tree, is to continue merging patches in that branch and not rebase it, for people to be able to use it as a base for their own development. The criteria for merging patches in this tree would be:
1) a patch to be merged is already in a later upstream tree, or
2) a proposed patch must have a high probability of being merged upstream in the future, and
3) only bugfixes would be merged once a new "stable" branch is available.
What do people think?
Nicolas