Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

[NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>]

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On Tue, 27 May 2014 23:22:16 +0200 (CEST) Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz> wrote:

> On Wed, 28 May 2014, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > > With my distro person hat on, I'd really like to call at least for pushing 
> > > driver maintainers much harder to be a lot more verbose in their 
> > > changelogs (if splitting the commits into smaller chunks is not an 
> > > option). Without that, trying to find out what change might potentially 
> > > cause what kind of behavior turns into a nightmare.
> > > 
> > > For an example picked up in a completely in random, look at this one
> > > 
> > > 	commit 1ba981fd3ad1f91b8bb205ce6aac6aad45f2fa7a
> > > 	Author: James Smart <james.smart@emulex.com>
> > > 	Date:   Thu Feb 20 09:56:45 2014 -0500
> > > 
> > > 	    [SCSI] lpfc 8.3.45: Incorporated support of a low-latency io path
> > 
> > Well, I don't disagree, but getting driver writers to supply changelogs
> > is hard.  
> 
> I know. But there just a one single force on planet Earth that can make 
> this happen, and that's maintainer saying "No, you have to do better".
> 
> > For the ones I understand, I've rewritten (or even composed) quite a few 
> > change logs myself because I often don't get anything usable back when I 
> > request a rewrite.
> 
> Are you implying that Linux is still not in a position to force HW vendor 
> companies to rather invest 30 man-minutes in order to have a proper 
> changelog and driver merged in Linus' tree compared to receiving bad 
> public press when they are being rejected (especially for such negligible 
> reason as changelog text)?

Even if they spend the 30 minutes, will the changelog be of any value?
Writing a good changelog is quite an art, and we don't even have something
like checkpatch.pl to highlight to worst offenders.

I came across a patch the other day which had quite a reasonable changelog
comment which suggested the patch was a clean-up - and quite a sensible one.
But the patch was also tagged for -stable, and had a couple of Cc:s which
made me think it was probably a bug-fix and the Cc: people had reported the
bug.  But there was no hint in the changelog what the bug might have been...

I quite often write or re-write changelogs for people who seem unable or
unwilling or unmotivated to do a better job.  I could just keep saying "no"
until they get it right, but when it is a real bugfix or a useful improvement
I want the  patch and the cost/benefit of pushing for a better changelog
rises sharply.

So I agree that I would love better changelogs and I think it is an important
part of the maintainer role to keep changelog quality high just as much as
keeping code quality high.  But every maintainer is in a different situation
and there is a limit to what we can expect of other maintainers.

It is nonetheless good to regularly remind each other that changelog quality
is really important.

Thanks,
NeilBrown


> 
> > My intolerance for bad changelogs is high in shared code, but for single 
> > vendor drivers it's often hard just to get the code and keep it in sync, 
> > so I have a lot lower tolerance.
> 
> Unfortunately this doesn't make much of a difference for distro vendors 
> when chasing unknown bugs.
> 
> Thanks,
> 


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