Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Tue, 2014-05-27 at 16:39 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2014, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > > I think SCSI is almost uniquely difficult for this.  The drivers are so
> > > big and different from each other.  Competitors aren't going to review
> > > each other's code.
> > 
> > To be honest, my review standard for drivers is does it pass checkpatch
> > (for an ignored subset of warnings, like lines over 80 characters), does
> > it compile individually and when I look through the patch does anything
> > leap out as wrong.  That's by no means an extensive review, but it's
> > about all that you can do without understanding the internals of the
> > driver.  I figure mostly that if something goes wrong within a big
> > driver then in won't affect other drivers, so the manufacturer would
> > only have themselves to blame and thus be nicely motivated to fix it.
> 
> With my distro person hat on, I'd really like to call at least for pushing 
> driver maintainers much harder to be a lot more verbose in their 
> changelogs (if splitting the commits into smaller chunks is not an 
> option). Without that, trying to find out what change might potentially 
> cause what kind of behavior turns into a nightmare.
> 
> For an example picked up in a completely in random, look at this one
> 
> 	commit 1ba981fd3ad1f91b8bb205ce6aac6aad45f2fa7a
> 	Author: James Smart <james.smart@emulex.com>
> 	Date:   Thu Feb 20 09:56:45 2014 -0500
> 
> 	    [SCSI] lpfc 8.3.45: Incorporated support of a low-latency io path

Well, I don't disagree, but getting driver writers to supply changelogs
is hard.  For the ones I understand, I've rewritten (or even composed)
quite a few change logs myself because I often don't get anything usable
back when I request a rewrite.

My intolerance for bad changelogs is high in shared code, but for single
vendor drivers it's often hard just to get the code and keep it in sync,
so I have a lot lower tolerance.

James


James