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

Martin K. Petersen
2019-06-13T15:04:01Z

James,

> 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.

My pet peeve is with the constant stream of seemingly innocuous
helper-interface-of-the-week changes. Such as "Use kzfoobar() instead of
kfoobar() + memset()". And then a year later somebody decides kzfoobar()
had a subtle adverse side-effect and now we all need to switch to
kpzfoobar().

I appreciate that some of these helpers may have merit in terms of
facilitating static code checkers, etc. But other than that, I really
fail to see the value of this constant churn.

The devil is always in the details. It's almost inevitably these obvious
five-liners that cause regressions down the line.

So why do we keep doing this?

--
Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering