On Tue, 27 May 2014 23:22:16 +0200 (CEST) Jiri Kosina 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 > > > 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, >