linux-kernel - Re: Linux-4.X-rcY patches can't be applied with git?

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Date:   Mon, 24 Oct 2016 22:49:59 -0400
From:   Jarod Wilson <jarod@...hat.com>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Josh Boyer <jwboyer@...oraproject.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <greg@...ah.com>
Subject: Re: Linux-4.X-rcY patches can't be applied with git?

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 05:06:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod@...hat.com> wrote:
> >
> > But in that case, what if your patch generation script used a filter to
> > exclude those binary files? No harm to that target audience, and it would
> > actually make them behave better for distro builds. Though that might be
> > counter to the goal of making them disappear entirely. :)
> 
> Heh, I'd rather people get the warning that "oops, something is
> incomplete". They can still work with the end result, but at least
> they got some indication that hey, that patch didn't work wonderfully
> well...
> 
> To be honest, I really would like to not do the tar-balls and patches at all.
> 
> But maybe rather than saying "it's only for legacy 'patch' users", I
> could just say that it's getting phased out, and say "you have to use
> 'git apply' to apply them".
> 
> Then I could just enable "--binary" and "-M", and see what happens.

I like this idea!

> I suspect that these days, git is so ubiquitous that it's ok.
> 
> And then in a few years, maybe I can just stop doing patches entirely,
> having proved the point that everybody already has git ;)

Honestly, the only people that don't have access to git to pull down
kernel sources? People who haven't yet got a kernel up and running, who
will probably get there via a distro kernel. ;)

Side note in favor of tarballs: I know Fedora likes upstream to have
tarballs, with checksums provided, so that packages can be verified to
contain a legitimate upstream source tarball, rather than a random tarball
created by the packager that could have some extraneous bits (possibly
malicious) added to them. One can certainly examine and validate a
generated tarball too, but it's a fair bit more work than just "does the
checksum match?" and not as easily automated.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod@...hat.com