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

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 08:26:13AM +0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-05-29 at 16:34 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > > Just preparing it for gerrit takes a long time (around ten minutes per
> > > patch), which really reduces the volume of trivial patches, just because
> > > no-one has that much energy (although some would argue it reduces the
> > > volume too far).
> > > 
> > > It's human nature to spend more time on the easy problems, so a flood of
> > > trivial patches which are "obviously" correct is easier to review and
> > > include than one patch which alters something deep within mm and needs
> > > careful thought.  At best, excessively split trivial patches are a
> > > dilution of our review effort and at worst, they're actively sucking
> > > people away from tackling the hard problems.
> > 
> > I have not heard of these "cleanup" patches taking anyone's review
> > cycles up for the "harder" patches, do you have examples of it?
> 
> Yes, me.

Then flat out reject them.  Some subsystem maintainers do.  Or, push
back, like you said later with a "I'll take this if you will maintain
the driver from now on." :)

No one is forcing you to take these drivers, but as someone who has
really old code, I can see how it would get annoying with people hitting
you with cleanup patches.  Maybe you should just do a "coding style
cleanup" set of patches yourself one release to get it all in shape then
not have to worry about it anymore.  That's what I did years ago for the
USB drivers...

thanks,

greg k-h