Ubuntu ARM and the linaro kernels

[Ricardo Salveti]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Nicolas Pitre
<nicolas.pitre at canonical.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Ricardo Salveti wrote:
>> That's understandable. Now the question is why John is maintaining and
>> packaging a tree that also incorporate the Ubuntu sauce on it?
>
> I think that the main reason is that this was much easier to have a
> packaged initial release by simply piggybacking on the existing Ubuntu
> infrastructure.  But John's tree and mine are still separate.

Ok, so there's nothing that guarantees that John will continue using
the same Ubuntu infrastructure and sauce in the future.

>>>> one option i see is that we use the linaro branches as base and add all
>>>> distro kernel specifics on top here, but thats something the kernel team
>>>> has to agree to since they will have to be the ones doing that work (and
>>>> i personally cant really judge how much work this is for them).
>> >
>> > I'm afraid this might have to be the case.  However, Git is pretty
>> > powerful and effective to carry such a task.
>>
>> This will probably be the case. At least it's the one that makes more
>> sense in the Linaro's perspective.
>>
>> Now the question is, are we sure that this will actually reduce the
>> workflow for the Ubuntu kernel team? I know in case of Omap 3 it was
>> one additional flavor, but was somehow OK because it follows upstream
>> and they are already used with it. Having the Linaro tree as reference
>> instead of upstream will probably produce a better ARM kernel, but it
>> seems that it'll give more work to the kernel team, instead of making
>> things easier.
>
> What extra work do you see? Maybe we could discuss it?

Probably the work needed to track and merge another tree into the ARM
related ones. Currently they just need to worry about the upstream
tree, and to carry the Ubuntu sauce on it. Having and additional
kernel tree to track and merge will give some more work than they had
for Maverick, because they will have more patches to review and to
maintain, in case of conflicts and etc.

I know this all makes sense, and it's good for the quality of both
ubuntu and linaro's kernel, but it gives the impression that they will
end up dealing with more work than they had for Maverick.

-- 
Ricardo Salveti de Araujo