[Sound-open-firmware] A branch can be used as to-be-upstreamed?

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

On 9/8/20 3:19 AM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Sep 2020 03:47:46 +0200,
> Liao, Bard wrote:
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Sound-open-firmware <sound-open-firmware-bounces at alsa-
>>> project.org> On Behalf Of Takashi Iwai
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2020 2:59 AM
>>> To: sound-open-firmware at alsa-project.org
>>> Subject: [Sound-open-firmware] A branch can be used as to-be-upstreamed?
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> as we got a bug report about the new Dell laptop with SoundWire audio, I
>>> tried to build a kernel with the downstream SOF patches, then I noticed that
>>> it's not so trivial to get the patches from SOF git tree that are applicable on
>>> top of upstream (either sound or Linus) tree.
>>>
>>> Do we have a branch that may contain clean commits on top of the recent
>>> upstream?  That is, a branch that is regularly rebased, so that each commit
>>> can be retrieved as a patch.  Such a branch will make upstream submission
>>> easier, and it makes easier for distros to take the downstream patches, too.
>>
>> Yes, please see the topic/sof-dev-rebase branch.
>> https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/commits/topic/sof-dev-rebase
> 
> Thanks, that's it!

Our process is that on a ~weekly basis, we cherry-pick the SOF patches 
applied to the topic/sof-dev branch and use a script to keep track of 
all GitHub reviewers.
Then we merge the for-next branches into the SOF tree (topic/sof-dev 
branch), and we rebase the topic/sof-dev-rebase branch. The rebase 
process helps us track how many patches are still outstanding, 
dependencies, etc. The two branches are identical in terms of code, 
except that we play with the patch order (most important/urgent first) 
and commit messages.
Then we split the work and Bard/Ranjani/Kai/me take care of sending 
patches from topic/sof-dev-rebase to alsa-devel. When we have comments 
from upstream, we first fix them in topic/sof-dev, use the fixup! prefix 
and then autosquash the patches as needed after the cherry-picks and 
send new versions.
Hope this helps
-Pierre