Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262476AbUFRU5N (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Jun 2004 16:57:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263687AbUFRUxn (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Jun 2004 16:53:43 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:27833 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262101AbUFRUtC (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Jun 2004 16:49:02 -0400 Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:51:36 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Rik van Riel Cc: axboe@suse.de, dev@opensound.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Stop the Linux kernel madness Message-Id: <20040618135136.45581da7.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20040618082708.GD12881@suse.de> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1186 Lines: 26 Rik van Riel wrote: > > Maintaining a patch for one version of the distribution, in > order to get a feature to customers sooner, is perfectly > doable and may make economic sense. > > Maintaining an out-of-tree patch forever because you didn't > get around to merging it into the upstream kernel doesn't. Problem is, what happens if vendor X ships a feature and that feature is deemed unacceptable for the kernel.org kernel? There are examples of this and as I've earlier indicated, I'd be OK with merging some fairly stinky things after 2.7 forks off, as a service to the major kernel.org customers and as a general lets-keep-things-in-sync exercise. But we then need to do it all again in 2.8.x. It's hard to see how to fix this apart from either merging everything into the main tree or dropping things from vendor trees. Or waiting for someone to come up with an acceptable form of whatever it is the patch does. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/