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

[Bjorn Helgaas <bhelgaas@google.com>]

On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 10:49 AM James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:

> 2) Patch Acceptance Consistency: At the moment, we have very different
> acceptance criteria for patches into the various maintainer trees.
> Some of these differences are due to deeply held stylistic beliefs, but
> some could be more streamlined to give a more consistent experience to
> beginners who end up doing batch fixes which cross trees and end up
> more confused than anything else.  I'm not proposing to try and unify
> our entire submission process, because that would never fly, but I was
> thinking we could get a few sample maintainer trees to give their
> criteria and then see if we could get any streamlining.  For instance,
> SCSI has a fairly weak "match the current driver" style requirement, a
> reasonably strong get someone else to review it requirement and the
> usual good change log and one patch per substantive change requirement.
>  Other subsystems look similar without the review requirement, some
> have very strict stylistic requirements (reverse christmas tree, one
> variable definition per line, etc).  As I said, the goal wouldn't be to
>  beat up on the unusual requirements but to see if we could agree some
> global baselines that would at least make submission more uniform.

The "when in Rome" rule (follow local conventions) would cover a large
fraction of the style issues without requiring global uniformity or
even documentation.  I'm amazed at how often it is ignored.