From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750982AbXCNRwM (ORCPT ); Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:52:12 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752713AbXCNRwM (ORCPT ); Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:52:12 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.24]:47674 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750982AbXCNRwL (ORCPT ); Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:52:11 -0400 Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:51:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Steven Rostedt cc: Jan Engelhardt , Ingo Molnar , Andi Kleen , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , Chris Wright , Rusty Russell , Glauber de Oliveira Costa Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/18] Make common x86 arch area for i386 and x86_64 - Take 2 In-Reply-To: <1173893944.31159.60.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: References: <20070314050819.536207642@goodmis.org> <20070314125330.GA13168@elte.hu> <1173879210.31159.30.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20070314134112.GB13486@elte.hu> <1173883577.31159.50.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1173893944.31159.60.camel@localhost.localdomain> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > That's created at build time. But I don't see anywhere in a freshly > cloned repo or fresh untar of the linux tarball, where there exists any > symbolic links. There are none. Symlinks embedded in the source tree tend to be hard to maintain: you can traditionally not send patches to add/change/move/remove them, and not everybody can even import them at all (ie some people have been so damaged by CVS that they maintain their kernels in it - I'm trying my best to be a humanitarian and rid the world of the scourge that is CVS, but I'm not sure I can undo the untold mental damage wrought by it over decades of quiet suffering). With git, you can track symlinks and send them as patches, but we've not really had a huge reason to do so. They are easy enough to generate from Makefiles if required, and quite often you don't really need to anyway (ie the "symlink" is often just a make rule, like the SRCDIR := ../../../i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq line I quoted earlier). So I'd rather not even start using symlinks unless there is some really good reason. We can continue to just use Makefiles. Linus