Re: about the flood of trivial patches and the Code of Conduct (was: Re: [PATCH 19/25] sched: Use bool function return values of true/false not 1/0)

From: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@rjwysocki.net>
To: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard.weinberger@gmail.com>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>, Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Subject: Re: about the flood of trivial patches and the Code of Conduct (was: Re: [PATCH 19/25] sched: Use bool function return values of true/false not 1/0)
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:31:23 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1835148.WK9y2EKkR9@vostro.rjw.lan> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20150407113212.GM21418@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net>

On Tuesday, April 07, 2015 01:32:12 PM Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 01:28:27PM +0200, Richard Weinberger wrote:
> > Can't we send all these kind of patches through the trivial tree?
> > Don't get me wrong, if you are fine with these patches that's you decision.
> > But other maintainers might think they have to take these patches and
> > get overloaded. I'm thinking of drivers maintainers that can only work
> > one or two hours per week on Linux.
> > Not everyone works full time on it like you.
> > 
> > I propose to send all this stuff though the trivial tree such that maintainers
> > of other subsystems have less workload and newbies (which are supposed
> > to send such patches) know which tree they have to work against.
> > Let's have to well defined and ordered. :-)
> 
> As per the other branch of this tree; an emphatic NO to that. The
> trivial tree is not a backdoor to bypass maintainers. Actual code
> changes do not get to go through any tree but the maintainer tree unless
> explicitly ACKed.

Well, practically speaking, that would make changes like the recent
clockevents_notify() removal very difficult to carry out.  Also there is
some natural cross-talk between certain subsystems.

Different matter is the real value of tree-wide cleanup changes.  If code is
old enough it often is better to leave it alone, even though it may be doing
things that we don't usually do nowadays.

Or things that new patches are not supposed to do, for that matter, so
I generally don't like the "checkpatch.pl error fix" changes in the old code.

Rafael