Re: [Cocci] coccinelle: Convert comma to semicolons (was Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: Add test for comma use that should be semicolon)

From: "Valdis Klētnieks" <valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu>
To: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@inria.fr>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	kernel-janitors <kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org>,
	kernelnewbies <kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org>,
	linux-kernel-mentees@lists.linuxfoundation.org,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	cocci <cocci@systeme.lip6.fr>,
	Giuseppe Scrivano <gscrivan@redhat.com>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Subject: Re: [Cocci] coccinelle: Convert comma to semicolons (was Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: Add test for comma use that should be semicolon)
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2020 15:11:44 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <173999.1601147504@turing-police> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <58673398c6b836ebd7509f787e6f0d10bfd751bc.camel@perches.com>

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On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 10:26:27 -0700, Joe Perches said:
> And the generic individual maintainer apply rate for
> each specific patch is always less than 50%.
>
> For instance the patches that converted the comma uses
> in if/do/while statements to use braces and semicolons
> from a month ago:

> 29 patches, 13 applied.

To be fair, it's *always* been hard to get pure style patches applied, because
they usually hit one of two types of code, with different results:

Some of them hit code that's been stable for a long time - and those patches
don't get applied because of the (admittedly small) risk that a "style" patch
may actually break something - yes, that *does* happen often enough to worry a
risk-adverse subtree maintainer.

Some of them hit code that's actively being worked on - and those patches don't
get applied because they can cause merge conflicts.

This is a hard problem to fix, because it's difficult to say that either of
those viewpoints is *totally* wrong. At best, you can make the case that some
maintainers are a tad over-zealous on their attitude. And since its *hard* to
find good maintainers, it's not possible to fix the problem by just putting
somebody else in charge of a subtree. It's theoretically possible to bypass a
problematic maintainer by sending the patch to the person one level up, or
directly to Linus - but although that usually works if you have an urgent patch
and the maintainer is on vacation or stubborn or whatever, that's got
essentially zero chance of succeeding for a mere style patch.

Unfortunately, although I understand the problem, I don't have a solution. It's
easy to tactfully say "this code is wrong, and here is the fix".  It's a lot
harder to find a tactful way to say "This person is wrong and should do it this
way", because code doesn't fight back when you offer constructive criticism....

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