Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 29 Dec 2001 15:14:40 -0800 | From | Larry McVoy <> | Subject | Re: The direction linux is taking |
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On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 10:58:27PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > Wrong. Most patches are independant, and even touch different functions. > > > > Really? And the data which shows this absolute statement to be true is > > where? I'm happy to believe data, but there is no data here. > > I rarely get clashes in merges with either 2.2 or with 2.4-ac when I was > doing it. Offsets from multiple patches to the same file happen some times > but its very rare two people had overlapping changes and when it happened > it almost always meant that the two of them needed to talk because they were > fixing the same thing or adding related features.
So that means that pretty much 100% of development to any one area is being done by one person?!? That's cool, but doesn't it limit the speed at which forward progress can be made? And does that mean for any area there is only one person who really understands it?
I'm not sure that you want single threading of development to be something enforced by your development process, and that's what it is starting to sound like more and more. Isn't it true that a lack of merge conflicts means that there is no parallel development in that area?
We have lots of commercial customers using BK on the Linux kernel, they are doing embedded this and that. The rate of change that they make is much greater than the rate of change made in the Linus maintained tree. I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's just different. I can say that merging is a huge issue in commercial shops. It's interesting to hear that it is not in Linux.
Some sociology guy with a CS background should do a study on this and explore the differences. Is fast change better? Is slow change better? -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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