Why is linux-next rebased every day?

Posted Jul 8, 2008 22:57 UTC (Tue) by russell (guest, #10458)
In reply to: Why is linux-next rebased every day? by epa
Parent article: The current development kernel is...linux-next?

It's exploring what history will look like after the next merge window.  To do that, it needs
to try many different versions of that history until everything fits together with, hopefully,
the least amount of effort.

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Why is linux-next rebased every day?

Posted Jul 10, 2008 1:48 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (1 responses)

I still don't understand.  Why is the rebasing necessary?  It is because we don't *want* to
see the intermediate states (the entire history of linux-next) when we later look back at the
history of trunk?

If that were all that were desired, couldn't you, um, rebase just before merging it back to
trunk?

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I really don't understand git very well.

Why is linux-next rebased every day?

Posted Jul 10, 2008 14:40 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

"I still don't understand.  Why is the rebasing necessary?  It is because we don't *want* to
see the intermediate states (the entire history of linux-next) when we later look back at the
history of trunk?"

Yes.  Though it'd also make the history of linux-next itself pretty complicated.  If they were
willing to add a ton of merges they could preserve all of the old versions of linux-next in
its history.  The resulting history would be very messy--e.g. you'd probably see the same
changes made multiple times in multiple places (since a new commit would be created each time
a developer revised or rebased a patch).

"If that were all that were desired, couldn't you, um, rebase just before merging it back to
trunk?"

Yeah, so linux-next would end up carrying a bunch of "meta-history" that wasn't ever submitted
to mainline.

I dunno whether it'd help or just confuse people.