Dear Stefan Roese,
In message 508FA904.4070402@denx.de you wrote:
Changes in v6:
- Fix compile warning: release.S:354:0: warning: "EPAPR_MAGIC" redefined
...
As you know this patch is part of a patch-series. And this is the first time that this patch has a change. So this summary covers the complete history for this patch.
But exactly this is information which I do not have, and which is not included in your patch. As is, I can only intepret this to be version 6 of this specific commit, and I wonder which changes were made in the previous 5 versions.
In this version of the patch series, I only made this small change to this patch 1/7. I wanted to spare the list a resending of the complete patchset for such a small change.
So what is the recommended way to do this? Is it really recommended/required to repost the complete patch series upon a small change in only one patch? No problem, I can do this. patman makes it very easy. :)
Should I repost the complete series again?
No, not at all!
I understand you are using patman for patch management. So I added Simon on Cc: to have his oponion, too.
I see two options:
1) Versioning is done on a per-patch base. In this case, this patch should have been submitted as "[PATCH v2 1/7]", in which case it would have been clear to everybody that this is the first and only change compared to previous submission(s).
I don't dare to say "most", but at least some people have worked like this when submitting patch series (manually) in the past.
I can understand if somebody argues that it is not exactly easy to collect the correspondign patches to a series if individual patches contain different version numbers. Correct threading of the messages is essential here.
2) Versioning is done on a per-series base.
One problem here is that it becomes difficult to keep track if what is what when only single patches of the series change and get reposted - on the other hand it has always been a major PITA when people repost whole series after only changing a line of two in on of their many patches, so we strongly encourage posting of only the changed patches. Once more, proper threading appears to be essential.
Another problem is what we are running into here: after severl versions of the patch series one patch that has been untouches previously gets changed. Now it gets posted as "V6", and it's impossible to know how many previous versions of this patch might have been posted before - one? 2? 3? 4? or 5?
When the version ID refers to the patch series rather than to the individual patch, then I think it is mandatory to take this into consideration in the patch history, whih then must refer to all versions of the _series_. In the present case, the patch history should have looked like this:
V2: no changes V3: no changes V4: no changes V5: no changes V6: Fix compile warning: release.S:354:0: warning: "EPAPR_MAGIC" redefined
Is there any clear majority of preferences for patch versioning? My gut feeling is that more people would like version IDs on a per-series base, but I would like to see some confirmation for this, and the we should document such expectations.
It appears that patman is oriented toward using a single version ID per series. Simon - would it be possible to automatically add such "no changes" information when generating the patches?
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk