Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Dividing Up the Series File

I categorize the patches in the series file into a number of logical groups. Each section of like patches begins with a block of comments that describes the purpose of the patches that follow.

The sequence of patch groups that I maintain follows. The ordering of these groups is important; I’ll describe why after I introduce the groups.

• The “accepted” group. Patches that the development team has submitted to the maintainer of the Infiniband subsystem and that he has accepted, but that are not present in the snapshot that the tiny repository is based on. These are “read only” patches, present only to transform the tree into a similar state as it is in the upstream maintainer’s repository.

• The “rework” group. Patches that I have submitted, but that the upstream maintainer has requested modifications to before he will accept them.

• The “pending” group. Patches that I have not yet submitted to the upstream maintainer, but that we have finished working on. These will be “read only” for a while. If the upstream maintainer accepts them upon submission, I’ll move them to the end of the “accepted” group. If he requests that I modify any, I’ll move them to the beginning of the “rework” group.

• The “in progress” group. Patches that are actively being developed, and should not be submitted anywhere yet.

• The “backport” group. Patches that adapt the source tree to older versions of the kernel tree.

• The “do not ship” group. Patches that for some reason should never be submitted ...