Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Pull network and Patch Acceptance Consistency

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

Em Thu, 13 Jun 2019 11:41:32 -0700
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> escreveu:

> On Thu, 2019-06-13 at 14:27 -0300, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > Em Thu, 13 Jun 2019 07:35:07 -0700
> > James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> escreveu:  
> > > It depends: every patch you do to an old driver comes with a risk
> > > of breakage.  What we've found is even apparently sane patches
> > > cause breakage which isn't discovered until months later when
> > > someone with the hardware actually tests.   
> > 
> > True, but, if you do the diff between the .o file produced before
> > the patch and after it (and/or the associated .a file), you should be
> > able to discover if the change caused a regression or not.
> > 
> > So, if the patch is a "pure" coding style fix, you could be able to
> > avoid regressions.  
> 
> Right, that's why I said "doesn't change the binary in the rules lower
> down".  However, the number of people who actually come with a same
> binary before and after section in their changelog is tiny ...
> 
> So perhaps we should document somewhere how (or even provide a tool) to
> demonstrate the binary remains the same across the patch, because it is
> an enormous help to subsystem maintainers.

Yeah, a tool or a CI bot test with would help to identify binary-identical
changes would be really helpful, as this could help a lot maintainers to
decide either to take or not cleanup patches (including those coccinelle
stuff) without requiring hardware testing.

Thanks,
Mauro