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Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:21:18 -0400
From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
To: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
       LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>,
       Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>,
       "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@gmail.com>, Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>,
       Robert Richter <robert.richter@amd.com>,
       Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>,
       Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC] to rebase or not to rebase on linux-next
Message-ID: <20091026052118.GB13941@mit.edu>
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	"Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
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	Robert Richter <robert.richter@amd.com>,
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On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 09:53:41PM -0700, Luck, Tony wrote:
> 
> If the "rewind" is simply to add "signed-off-by" notations, update
> commit comments (or code comments) ... then it does seem useful to
> keep the commit chain anchored to the original commit, as the testing
> that has been done is all still valid.
> 
> But as soon as you talk about fixing bugs ... then you ought to
> just do a "rebase".  The code you are adding has changed, so it is
> incorrect to preserve the illusion that these changes have had
> extensive testing against the old commit base.  The code has changed,
> so the testing clock gets reset to zero.

I don't think anyone should (or does?) use the base version of a patch
series as an indication of how much testing a patch series has
received.  It doesn't make much sense.

Suppose I update the 40th patch of a 50th patch series to add check
for kmalloc() returning NULL that had been inadvertently left out, or
some other error checking is added.  Or suppose I add a new tracepoint
definition to a 50 patch series.  Sorry, I'm not going to rewind the
entire patch series because someone thinks the base version of the
patch series somehow is a magic "test clock" indicator....

      	     	     	  	      	     - Ted
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