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)

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 02:31:23PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > 
> > 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.

I would not call the clockevents_notify() series "trivial". More advanced
clean ups that are system wide, would be different, because you are changing
the way the code works. The maintainers must be Cc'd, but sometimes I find
those changes are very hard to get acks from everyone. But again, the change
is a non trivial clean up and has other reasons for going in than just to
make the code look nice.

> 
> 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 maybe it's a good time to rewrite that code such that everyone can understand
it today ;-)

> 
> 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.
>

I totally agree with that. But for non trivial clean ups, old code should be
updated too.

-- Steve