On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 11:35:41AM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
The instructions at:
http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/CustodianGitTrees
... indicate that downstream branches should be rebased onto ${upstream}/master immediately prior to sending a pull request. I'm not sure this is correct any more, given that upstream master branches now pull in downstream branches via "git merge" rather than "git rebase". Should that page be changed?
Yes.
The question then becomes: What commit should downstream branches use as their baseline. I assert that they should be free to choose any commit in their upstream master branch (or merge in any upstream commit), or any further upstream branch all the way up to u-boot/master.
I disagree. It should be limited to your direct upstream only because..
As background, I want to send a commit to the Tegra tree that enables use of CONFIG_CMD_FS_GENERIC, and additionally, re-write bootcmd in Tegra's default environment to use the new shell commands that config option enables.
However, the commits that implement CONFIG_CMD_FS_GENERIC are in u-boot/master but not yet in u-boot-arm/master. So, Tegra's master branch can't simply be based on current u-boot-arm/master, since if it was, applying my patch would break functionality until it was merged with u-boot/master and so picked up the actual implementation.
Yay for making use of new functionality, but..
Hopefully, u-boot-arm/master will merge in (or get reset to) u-boot/master fairly shortly. However, should Tegra's repo have to wait for this?
Yes, tegra has to wait otherwise you've just forced u-boot-arm into a re-sync with master and now u-boot-arm can't where problems came from, be it your tree or master. Patience is required, and I expect that Albert will update to current master before starting his pull requests. I also think it's fine to state that your pull request depends on $rev being merged in prior to your pull. But this is roughly how the kernel trees work I believe. You do a series of patches, state your pre-request and deal with merging the changes up the different trees as they are ready for it.