Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Rethinking the acceptance policy for "trivial" patches

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org>]

Em Thu, 22 Apr 2021 07:21:26 +0300
Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org> escreveu:

> On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 11:35:36AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > I've long been on record as not really being a fan of trivial patches
> > because they can cause merge issues with current patches and introduce
> > bugs, particularly in older drivers, that don't get detected for a long
> > while.  However, the recent events with the University of Minnesota:
> > 
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210421130105.1226686-1-gregkh@linuxfoundation.org/
> > 
> > Have elevated the risk factor around trivial patches claiming to fix
> > bugs to the point where it looks like there's no such thing as a truly
> > trivial patch and they all need reviewing.  
> 
> While we are talking about policies, I would like to raise another bad
> practice that is done by even seasoned developers - sending patches with
> carefully crafted and filtered TO and CC.
> 
> This practice causes to get out of context patches without ability to
> see whole picture and the worse part that it divides feedback to
> "islands" without ability to agree or disagree with the feedback.
> 
> I'm putting this link as an EXAMPLE where every patch has different CC participants:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rdma/CAJX1Ytb=XYKGeYuEN-2tPv9hx3G+=wnGWMzPk893J__JJFyhGQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#mf56c926ec0279a65fe180110b7dcf93fe053b91a

This is not a matter of bad practice. There are a couple of reasons
why each patch on a series will have a different group of Cc, like:

	- driver maintainers for each patch may be different;
	- scripts/get_maintainers.pl will return a different Cc/To;
	- patch series touch different subsystems;
	- sending a patch with too many c/c can make it rejected by
	  mail list servers.

Also, nowadays, with lore and b4, it would be easy to retrieve the
entire patch series, even for those that aren't subscribed on a 
c/c mailing list.

Thanks,
Mauro