linuxppc trees, what is going on ?

[Paul Mackerras]

Sven Luther writes:

> Last year, there was linuxppc_2_4 and the -benh tree. But since december
> 24, this tree doesn't seem to be touched anymore, and a new linuxppc-2.4
> tree is used.

The linuxppc_2_4* trees were set up before Marcelo moved over to using
BitKeeper to maintain his 2.4 tree.  As such, the linuxppc_2_4* trees
are not descendents of Marcelo's tree, according to BK, and are
updated by applying patches to the linux_2_4 tree, which then get
pulled from there into linuxppc_2_4, and from there into
linuxppc_2_4_devel and linuxppc_2_4_benh.

Now that Marcelo is using BK, this process means extra unnecessary
work.  Also, there are problems in those trees that have accumulated
over the years and that can't be solved in any simple way - there are
tag conflicts which keep popping up, and files have been renamed,
which gets confusing when changes made upstream to
arch/ppc/boot/Makefile get applied by BK to
arch/ppc/boot/prep/Makefile in the linuxppc_2_4 tree, since BK thinks
they are the same file.

The linuxppc-2.4 tree is a descendent of Marcelo's tree, and as such
we can pull changes that Marcelo makes in his tree directly into the
linuxppc-2.4 tree.

> Are we supposed to move to the linuxppc-2.4 tree, and if so, what is
> the rationale behind this change.

The idea of the linuxppc-2.4 tree is that it would stay closer to
Marcelo's tree, which would make my job in sending updates to Marcelo
easier.

In fact, for any substantial body of work which you want to have me
send to Marcelo, the best thing is to create a clone of Marcelo's
linux-2.4 tree, check your changes into that, and make it available
for me to pull from.  I can then pull from that and push the
changeset(s) into the tree that Marcelo pulls from.  That tree can
then also be pulled into the linuxppc-2.4 tree to make the changes
available there before Marcelo pulls them.

> Furthermore, 2.4.24 was released, and the linuxppc-2.4 now contains
> TAG: v2.4.24, and a bit later there is a Changeset marked as "Import
> 2.4.24 final tree". There used to be TAGS like TAG: v2.4.23_linuxppc_2_4
> which i used to take snapshots for releasing debian powerpc kernel
> packages. Will there still be those, did they simply get forgotten,
> should i sync with the v2.4.24 tags, or am i missing something.

2.4.24 was a bit strange.  Marcelo was doing the 2.4.24-pre series as
usual, but then released a 2.4.24 final with just a few changes from
2.4.23, and transferred all the changes that he had been accumulating
in 2.4.24-pre into 2.4.25-pre.  The linuxppc_2_4* trees haven't been
updated to reflect that yet.

What Marcelo did in his tree is to create a branch off the 2.4.23
release, checked in a few patches and then tagged that as 2.4.24.  He
then pulled those changes back into the main trunk (so to speak, BK
doesn't really have the concept of a "main trunk") and then released
2.4.25-pre4.

So far we haven't been tagging the points at which we merge Marcelo's
tree into linuxppc-2.4.  The linuxppc-2.4 tree will have Marcelo's
tags in it but those tags will be the same as in Marcelo's tree.

Development in 2.4 should be pretty much coming to a close, with all
new development being done in 2.6 now.  The linuxppc_2_4_devel tree
will stay around for historical reference but I would prefer not to
see new stuff go in there.

> BTW, while we were at renaming stuffs, would it not have been better to
> use linuxppc-2.6 instead of the linuxppc-2.5 we currently have ?

That would be a good idea.

Paul.

** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/