Better advice on using topic branches for kernel development

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The real problem is that maintainers often pick random - and not at
> all stable - points for their development to begin with. They just
> pick some random "this is where Linus -git tree is today", and do
> their development on top of that. THAT is the problem - they are
> unaware that there's some nasty bug in that version.

Maybe they do this because they read it in the Git user-manual.

Fix the manual to give them better guidance.

Signed-off-by: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

diff --git a/Documentation/user-manual.txt b/Documentation/user-manual.txt
index 5b6de22c960b5541efc425f2dd6407bd7d0ea1c8..77eb483b07bc3b04d5b32199553fff46c11fe7f0 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/user-manual.txt
+++ b/Documentation/user-manual.txt
@@ -2171,11 +2171,14 @@ $ git push mytree release
 
 Now to apply some patches from the community.  Think of a short
 snappy name for a branch to hold this patch (or related group of
-patches), and create a new branch from the current tip of Linus's
-branch:
+patches), and create a new branch from a recent stable tag of
+Linus's branch. Picking a stable base for your branch will:
+1) help you: by avoiding inclusion of unrelated and perhaps lightly
+tested changes
+2) help future bug hunters that use "git bisect" to find problems
 
 -------------------------------------------------
-$ git checkout -b speed-up-spinlocks origin
+$ git checkout -b speed-up-spinlocks v2.6.35
 -------------------------------------------------
 
 Now you apply the patch(es), run some tests, and commit the change(s).  If