Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Pull network and Patch Acceptance Consistency

[Bart Van Assche <bvanassche@acm.org>]

On 6/13/19 8:03 AM, Martin K. Petersen wrote:
> 
> James,
> 
>> It depends: every patch you do to an old driver comes with a risk of
>> breakage.  What we've found is even apparently sane patches cause
>> breakage which isn't discovered until months later when someone with
>> the hardware actually tests.
> 
> My pet peeve is with the constant stream of seemingly innocuous
> helper-interface-of-the-week changes. Such as "Use kzfoobar() instead of
> kfoobar() + memset()". And then a year later somebody decides kzfoobar()
> had a subtle adverse side-effect and now we all need to switch to
> kpzfoobar().
> 
> I appreciate that some of these helpers may have merit in terms of
> facilitating static code checkers, etc. But other than that, I really
> fail to see the value of this constant churn.
> 
> The devil is always in the details. It's almost inevitably these obvious
> five-liners that cause regressions down the line.
> 
> So why do we keep doing this?

How about discussing at the kernel summit whether or not patches that 
have not been tested on actual hardware should be ignored?

Thanks,

Bart.