I have been tracking 2.6.16.x here because Xen doesn’t have patches for 2.6.17 yet (why on earth that is, I don’t know.) But I need a few 2.6.17.x patches to the qla2xx driver. So I figure this is an opportunity to learn git.

I learned git, but then quickly learned that I can’t just pull random commits from one branch to another. I have to use git cherry-pick, which doesn’t actually pull the commit unmodified — it takes a diff, and commits a new patch based on that diff. So I expect problems later when I bump the local branch to 2.6.17.

This seems depressingly like arch/baz/bzr, and is a good reason for me to stay with darcs for now. This same operation with darcs would have been trivial, AND darcs would have automatically pulled in prerequisite patches rather than giving a merge failure and making me find them manually.