On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

Sorry for the late reply on my side. I'm not sure if I understand your
question correctly. Generally the rule is to not apply the same patch to
two separate branches because that can result in merge conflicts and/or an
unclean history.

No Probs.

The way to deal with dependencies in a case like this is to apply the patches
on one branch in the right order and ask different people to include parts of
that branch in their trees without rebasing.

For instance, you can take Mike's branch as a base (as long as he promises
to never rebase that branch), add some patches on top and ask him to pull that
commit with your additional clk patches. Then you add other patches for arm-soc
on top of that and ask me to pull that branch, including the clk commits that
originally came from Mike.

I can then pull the branch into one of the arm-soc branches that gets sent to
Linus after the clk tree was merged into v3.5-rc1.

It also works the other way round: You can base on top of patches that are
already in arm-soc, add more stuff that should go into arm-soc on top, and
add clk patches for Mike on top of that, which means that in the end, the
arm-soc tree has to go to Linus before the clk tree does.

The tricky part here is to avoid circular dependencies.

Can you please check my new PULL requests sent few minutes back.
I hope, i haven't done anything wrong this time. :)

--
viresh