In message 20031016105052.GR25427@pengutronix.de you wrote:
On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 12:31:11PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
I do not see the need for an "unstable branch". On contrary, I am convinced that a second branch in the public source tree would only increase the necessary maintenance efford.
Unfortunately this makes non-orthogonal patches difficult because they surely could break things.
I disagree. It just means that we will have to make sure to clean up any such mess quickly, at least before the next release.
This is a policy decision. It prevents that the project is drifting apart in different directions. I don't have the manpower and/or nerves to deal with many different branches.
Branches are evil. Just look at the mess we have with the PowerPC Linux kernel. There is linux-2.4 and linux-2.5 on kernel.org, and linuxppc-2.4 and linuxppc_2_4_devel and linuxppc-2.5 and BenH's "pmac stable tree" and the ameslab tree and the ppc64 tree and ...
If some change breaks the code so hard that it is impossible to fix it between releases that the change needs to be reworked first.
We did without branches when marging in ARMBoot, and when adding more architectures, and we will try to do without branches in the future. Period.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk