Re: Sashiko email policy precedence

["Danilo Krummrich" <dakr@kernel.org>]

On Tue Jun 9, 2026 at 6:26 PM CEST, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> "Danilo Krummrich" <dakr@kernel.org> writes:
>
>> On Mon Jun 1, 2026 at 11:46 AM CEST, Danilo Krummrich wrote:
>>> Flagging something as wide list seems rather simple [1], the tristate [2] would
>>> work as well, but seems a bit more complicated and potentially requires
>>> adjusting the existing policies.
>>
>> Roman, any preference on either of those or something else?
>
> Sorry for being late to the party.

No worries, and thanks for catching up.

> Yeah, the tricky balance here is that there are people who want more
> sashiko reviews and there are people who are quite vocal against it.
>
> And I don't want to over-complicate the setup, I'm afraid it will be
> just a constant source of disagreement.

I think it usually works out well as is if multiple subsystems are involved.

The only case where it falls apart is with wide lists potentially spanning all
subsystems with a certain policy, which if handled like any other list, may end
up taking precedence over all subsystem lists regardless of their preference.

Hence the proposal to just special case wide lists, so they can't take
precedence over everything.

> One option, is to switch from mailing list granularity to the
> MAINTAINERS-entry granularity. Wdyt?

As mentioned above, I think the main issue are wide lists, and switching to a
MAINTAINERS-entry granularity wouldn't cover that (unless I am missing
something).

> I don't think I have a perfect model in my head which will cover all edge
> cases, tbh.

The wide list case is not an edge case.

Taking the R4L list aside, if we would set reply_to_author for the LKML, which
does not seem entirely unreasonable, it would have the same effect, which is no
one's reply_all setting would be honored anymore.

> I personally think that reply_to_author + cc the main mailing list should work
> pretty much everywhere, but it looks like there are other opinions as well.

It can be quite cumbersome when people pick up a discussion based on a point
made by Sashiko and some people are excluded from the discussion because only
the mailing list and specific people are statically Cc'd.

People that were Cc'd explicitly on a patch series usually don't expect to have
to switch to the mailing list to capture every discussion.