Re: 5088/3: the SPI dependency

[Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 12:36:18AM +0200, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> 
> > 1. I was not informed that this patch relied upon the max7301 SPI
> >    support, until I found that it didn't build.
> 
> I did mention this in an email to Eric, when getting his ack to this 
> patch. But as I was submitting this patch to the patch system, I didn't 
> know (and I still don't) if and how one can provide comments to a patch 
> without them being included in the commit text. Like that provided in 
> normal patches between the "---" line and the patch body. Is this 
> possible? If yes, maybe it would be a good idea to extend the patch-system 
> help with this information.

It used to suggest that "follow up notes" could be added, but that
caused confusion.

I'm on a losing battle trying to document the patch system.  The
difficulty I have working any new text into the existing text without
causing more confusion.  So, I now ask people who see deficiencies to
come up with a suitable set of changes to the existing text.

The patch system allows notes to be added to a patch by the original
submitter.  Notes will only be included into the commit message if
they contain a signed-off-by or acked-by line.  So, if you don't want
a note to appear in the commit message, don't provide either.

> Anyway, sorry for not communicating this clearly.

However, I think you've only grasped half the problem here.  If you are
submitting a patch which creates a dependency between two peoples trees,
you need to tell *both* people about it, so they both know about the
dependency.

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