No pull for mtd?

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2013-07-17 at 16:26 -0700, Brian Norris wrote:
> Is there any hassling the rest of us can do in the future to avoid
> this situation? 

Certainly can't hurt :)

> Ezequiel gave a timely reminder via email (2 or 3 days
> left in the merge window). We can shout louder and earlier, but it's
> hard to tell if we're shouting into an empty forest sometimes.

Earlier is better. If I haven't got a tree lined up in good time
*before* the merge window opens, Linus isn't going to want to know.
So if the merge window is already open and I'm slacking and/or changing
nappies, that's a bit late already.

Occasionally when I've failed to get things together in time for the
merge window, I have handled that by just looking at Artem's "l2-mtd"
tree and submitting what's in there as-is, without making any changes.
Or submitting a strict subset of it, up to the *important* part but
leaving out some of the more dubious later commits which I want to
change or reject.

Normally though, I use Artem's l2-mtd tree a bit like patchwork. He
hoovers up most things from the list and even does some preliminary
fixes on them — so it's *much* more convenient for me than raw patchwork
would be. And it's close *enough* to what I'm actually going to accept,
that it's reasonable for it to be in linux-next as it is.

Artem has historically expressed a reticence to have direct commit
access to the main MTD tree (I think he does actually *have* it, in
fact, but he's never used it). I think he prefers that I continue to
have the final say after he does the first pass, and I think that model
generally works out OK as a division of labour.

So... other than putting a few more hours in my day (and ringfencing
them so they don't get used up by all the *other* things I need a few
more hours each day for, like sleeping as I should be doing right now),
what can we do?

Brian, Huang, thanks for volunteering to help. It's much appreciated.

I think the way forward, if Artem is willing, might be the following:

Turn the l2-mtd tree into a group-access repository, so all of us can
push to it (or rebase/reorder/etc). Try to keep it (as Artem already
does to a certain extent) in order of "good" and then "staging" patches.

It's that sorting that's important; I should be able to just pull the
'good' ones directly into the main tree as a stable commit which *will*
to go Linus. And then after a while, once we're all happy that I never
actually end up rejecting or even tweaking patches in the "good" pile,
we'll just start using the main linux-mtd.git tree as the "good" pile
and you can push there directly. I'll try to be more explicit about what
I change and why, in cases where I would previously have silently fixed
things up.

I'll probably still keep doing a final pass on it for a while even after
that, and constructing the pull request. But I'm not averse to letting
others do that too, once we've reached the point where I'm sure it'd be
as I want it.

How does that sound?

-- 
dwmw2

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