Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Rethinking the acceptance policy for "trivial" patches

[Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 11:20:01AM +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Em Thu, 22 Apr 2021 07:21:26 +0300
> Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org> escreveu:
> 
> > On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 11:35:36AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > I've long been on record as not really being a fan of trivial patches
> > > because they can cause merge issues with current patches and introduce
> > > bugs, particularly in older drivers, that don't get detected for a long
> > > while.  However, the recent events with the University of Minnesota:
> > > 
> > > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210421130105.1226686-1-gregkh@linuxfoundation.org/
> > > 
> > > Have elevated the risk factor around trivial patches claiming to fix
> > > bugs to the point where it looks like there's no such thing as a truly
> > > trivial patch and they all need reviewing.  
> > 
> > While we are talking about policies, I would like to raise another bad
> > practice that is done by even seasoned developers - sending patches with
> > carefully crafted and filtered TO and CC.
> > 
> > This practice causes to get out of context patches without ability to
> > see whole picture and the worse part that it divides feedback to
> > "islands" without ability to agree or disagree with the feedback.
> > 
> > I'm putting this link as an EXAMPLE where every patch has different CC participants:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rdma/CAJX1Ytb=XYKGeYuEN-2tPv9hx3G+=wnGWMzPk893J__JJFyhGQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#mf56c926ec0279a65fe180110b7dcf93fe053b91a
> 
> This is not a matter of bad practice. There are a couple of reasons
> why each patch on a series will have a different group of Cc, like:
> 
> 	- driver maintainers for each patch may be different;
> 	- scripts/get_maintainers.pl will return a different Cc/To;
> 	- patch series touch different subsystems;

Like Christoph said, if it is unrelated send the patches as separated
series.

> 	- sending a patch with too many c/c can make it rejected by
> 	  mail list servers.

In such cases, I put in To people who will apply the patches and in CC
only mailing lists.

> 
> Also, nowadays, with lore and b4, it would be easy to retrieve the
> entire patch series, even for those that aren't subscribed on a 
> c/c mailing list.

I'm pretty happy with my email flow and see a little value in reconstruction
of emails thread with b4 just to realize that the series is not important to me.

It also don't solve my "knowledge island" issue.

Thanks

> 
> Thanks,
> Mauro