rotating merge

Posted Jun 27, 2008 19:05 UTC (Fri) by tlw (guest, #31237)
Parent article: A day in the life of linux-next

Instead of opening the merge window and making it a free-for-all in a short 2-week period,
what if the merge window rotated among the different subsystems?

E.g. for the next N weeks only accept changes to subsystem A
for the next M weeks, only subsystem B
etc...

Wouldn't that help migrate the pain?

Of course different subsystems would clamor over what the ordering and durations should be...

And once we go full-circle and end up back at the first subsystem we bump a version number
somewhere and call that a release!

rotating merge

Posted Jun 27, 2008 22:09 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That doesn't work when major changes to two subsystems are coupled (say, a 
block layer change that necessitates changes to the scsi midlayer). I 
anticipate vast pointless bickering over what precisely constitutes a 
subsystem if this were done (plus a lot of unnecessary serialization of 
work).