Merge or Cherry-Pick?

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 08:18:10AM +0100, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 de February de 2011 01:23:01 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > just face it, git's merging concept makes most sense for longer-lived
> > feature branches, but not so much for bugfix branches. not even linux
> > itself uses a forward-merge strategy for bugfix branches.
> 
> How does the kernel work then? As far as I know, everything is merged.
>
not bugfix branches, e.g. what will become 2.6.37.1. it is in fact
maintained by a different person and linus doesn't care much for it.
it just works better if the stability of a patch is proven in someone
higher up the hierarchy's master.
fwiw, even in linux' history you'll find merged cherry-picks, but that's
presumably because less critical bugfixes often take so long to
propagate in the hierarchy.

having said that, i do think a clean forward-merging strategy is
worthwhile and feasible, given the proper infrastructure and mindsets -
e.g. what i envision for qt's opengov. but this is so utterly
incompatible with kde's resources and low quality standards^W^Wbarrier
to entry culture.