[alsa-devel] Merging alsa-driver and alsa-kmirror to one GIT repo

[Takashi Iwai]

At Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:17:57 +0200,
Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> 	I believe, it's time to manage only one GIT repository for the
> alsa-driver package now. The merge has benefits mainly for the end users
> - bisecting may work, the correlation between kernel sources and our
> out-of-kernel build framework becomes more strong.

The biggest question from my side is how to handle it in future.

IMHO, the current alsa-driver tree structure isn't in the best form.
Alternatively, we can change the alsa-driver tree into the standard
linux-kernel tree form: i.e. linux-kernel plus the extra alsa-driver
build stubs.  In that way, you can keep the consistency by pulling the
main kernel part easily into alsa-driver tree if the change in the
build stub is required.

Of course, it means some directory changes would be required.  But
git pull is much saner than cherry-picking each commit to a different
tree (alsa-kmirror) with directory/path conversions.

The downside is that creating a traditional alsa-driver release
tarball won't be straightforward but need some script.  But it
shouldn't be too hard.


Also, the release management of alsa-driver is another question.
It's pretty obvious that 99% of changes nowadays are in the driver.
And we are working rather together with the kernel release cycle more
than the ALSA release.  Thus it's more natural to release the
alsa-driver along the kernel release cycle.

That is, we may release alsa-driver-3.5 now containing the same stuff
for 3.5 kernel but also with the external build stubs.  It no longer
needs to stick with the old "ALSA version", IMO.  The ALSA version
is rather confusing for both users and developers since the same
version appears in the different kernels with pretty different ALSA
driver codes actually.


Thoughts?


thanks,

Takashi

> 	I merged the alsa-driver and alsa-kmirror repos with full history. I
> also added some code changes to enable the "build-in" mirror tree in
> Makefile and gitcompile from v1.0.18 (but I don't think that it will be
> used).
> 
> 	The structure of new repository is similar, but the kernel mirrored
> code is located in the mirror/ subdirectory. The paths are exactly same
> as in the Linux kernel tree, so possible patches can be applied without
> any path modifications. Of course, we may create a bash script to do
> proper and full cherry-picks between kernel and mirrored trees
> (comments, author, dates).
> 
> 	New temporary repository has name alsa-driver.new:
> 
> http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-driver.new.git;a=summary
> 
> 	The another difference is that the releases are now branches not tags.
> It allows me to do quick fixes out of the standard development or
> separate the main development in the release time window (to not include
> some very new code). The previous branches won't contain probably any
> additional commits, but it's probably better to play with only one
> reference scheme.
> 
> 	I think that the change from alsa-driver.git to alsa-driver.new.git
> should be quick. Please, report any objections or acks now.
> 
> 	Schedule: When accepted, I will rename the original alsa-driver.git
> repository to alsa-driver.old.git and move alsa-driver.new.git to
> alsa-driver.git quickly.
> 
> 	1.0.26 release: This was my last big change (with the ALSA server
> upgrade) which blocked me to do the 1.0.26 release. I'm going to create
> new release after the repos switch ASAP.
> 
> 					Jaroslav
> 
> -- 
> Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
> Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
> ALSA Project; Red Hat, Inc.
>