Re: [GIT PULL] KVM changes for 3.16-rc4

From: Paolo Bonzini
Date: Tue Jul 01 2014 - 18:41:46 EST


Il 01/07/2014 19:47, Linus Torvalds ha scritto:
Merges need explanations too. Tell what the branch you are merging
does, and why you are doing the merge. Yeah, in this case the "branch"
contains a single commit, but that *still* doesn't excuse not telling
what the merge is, and why it exists at all.

Seriously. Do "git log --merges" on current git, and look at the
discrepancy between merge commit messages. That commit 9a630d15f16d is
pure garbage.

It's not the only crappy one, but it really does stand out. There are
other one-liners in there, but even then they tend to have at least
*some* semblance of actual information in them, ie

Merge branch 'for-v3.16/ti-clk-drv' of
github.com:t-kristo/linux-pm into clk-next

at least shows that there's a topic branch with a reasonable name, and
where it comes from. I'd really prefer it to talk about what it merges
and why, but it's still *much* better than your completely
information-free merge message.

You're definitely right about the poor commit message.

I made this a merge because I really wanted this commit in the 3.17 development branch too. So I applied the patch on top of -rc1 and merged it into both branches (kvm-master for 3.16 and kvm-next for 3.17). For some reason, I did see a need to justify the merge commit in kvm-next:

commit dc720f95939280f9e69cafe7389be6d0fa6f22dd
Merge: 27e6fb5dae28 33b458d276bb
Author: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon Jun 30 16:51:07 2014 +0200

Merge commit '33b458d276bb' into kvm-next

Fix bad x86 regression introduced during merge window.

Probably still not verbose enough, but a little better.

Am I just over-engineering it and I should have simply cherry-picked it? In this particular case the change is not likely to get other changes (and thus conflicts) in kvm-next, but in general it could.

Thanks,

Paolo
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