Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] community management/subsystem governance

[Sasha Levin <Alexander.Levin@microsoft.com>]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 08:47:07AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
>On Mon, 2018-09-10 at 15:38 +0000, Sasha Levin via Ksummit-discuss
>wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 05:10:48AM -1000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> > On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 5:08 AM James Bottomley
>> > <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > On Mon, 2018-09-10 at 04:53 -1000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> > > >   "Live without email - possible?"
>> > >
>> > > Can I propose one small alteration to the topic:
>> > >
>> > >         "Patches without Email - Possible?"
>> >
>> > Yes, better. That's what I meant anyway.
>> >
>> > I still want the pull requests as email, and I still think email is
>> > often the best way to discuss things.
>>
>> Yes, email is great for discussions, but one concern I have is that
>> once discussions ended and a patch was merged, a lot of those
>> discussions are lost forever.
>>
>> It's somewhat easy to google a patch and look in lkml archives to see
>> some discussion as a result of the patch, but that's far from
>> perfect:
>>
>> 1. For different patch revisions, some discussions manage to hide in
>> the archives.
>> 2. Discussions that resulted in a patch being sent aren't linked to
>> the patch itself.
>> 3. Any discussions after the patch was merged aren't easy to locate,
>> specially if they're not in the same thread as the original patch.
>>
>> This makes the lives of stable/distro folks more difficult than it
>> should be.
>
>I disagree on this.  I have had occasion, when identifying patches that
>screwed something up, to go back to the emails to try to find out who
>did this and why.  As long as you're used to search interfaces it's
>usually easy to find.  Usually they are all threaded under the patch
>but the worst case I've seen is when v1, v2 ... vn aren't linked by
>thread, but even there searching for the specific patch set (0/n)
>subject title works.  So I think the data is all there in multiple
>archives and we do have powerful enough tools to find it.

Indeed, if *all* discussions happened in a single thread that was used
to submit the patch then sure - it's straightforward. However, consider
2 scenarios that we encounter on a weekly basis:

1. We see a stable patch but not sure why/how it fixes an issue. The
patch itself doesn't have enough information and there was no discussion
after the patch was submitted. However, there was a lot of discussion in
a completely unrelated thread unlinked from the patch submission. We
can't find that because it doesn't refer to the patch at all, it just
describes the problem and a solution.

2. We pull in a patch into the stable tree, but a few days later someone
reports a bug and points to that patch. It's easier to solve these cases
by grepping through mailboxes before shipping out stable releases, but
it adds a considerable amount of effort.


--
Thanks,
Sasha