Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Patch version changes in commit logs?

[Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 11:26:22AM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 3:51 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Personally, if there is a case where it will be useful, it would
> > actually be better for developers to summarize the comments, and
> > design alternatives, considered and rejected, etc., in a cover letter,
> > or better yet in the kernel documentation as part of the design doc
> > for a largish feature, and then if it is a cover letter e-mailed out
> > to the mailing list, include a link to the URL of the cover letter
> > with some text so that a human being reading the commit log will know
> > that there is something actually worth their time to read, as opposed
> > to being treated to a huge amount of legislative history that, at the
> > end of the day, be a complete waste of time to someone trying to debug
> > a live production problem causing data outages for their company.
> 
> I agree. I recently wanted to look into the development history
> of the contiguous memory allocator merged in 2012. This patch set
> went through 24 (!) iterations duly summarized in the cover letter:
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1333462221-3987-1-git-send-email-m.szyprowski@samsung.com/
> it not is on mm/cma.c.
> 
> The links to the earlier iterations on gmane are dead.
> 
> It is one of the more heroic attempts to fix a very real problem
> with memory management in embedded and mobile,
> the second part of which is hopefully coming to a resolution
> with John Stultz work on the ION destaging (ongoing).
> 
> The actual commit in the kernel looks like so:
> git log c64be2bb1c6eb43c838b2c6d57b074078be208dd
> 
> I would have to dig them all out of lore one by one to get
> the picture (and I guess I will). The story of CMA is a really
> interesting one, and now it is part of the MM core.
> Documentation/cma is pretty empty.
> 
> Asking Michal, Marek and Joonsoo who all worked hard on
> this to summarize the development and make the design
> and evolution of this feature understandable would be a
> pretty big development task in itself so I'm not gonna.
> 
> But maybe we should just merge a document with lore
> pointers to Documentation/cma for this feature, and others
> of the same impact?

If you anyway going to dig through it, putting a summary with lore pointers
in Documentation/ would be great.
 
> Yours,
> Linus Walleij
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> 

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Mike.