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Thu, 6 Aug 2026 11:58:11 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2026 17:57:54 +0200 From: Greg KH To: Theodore Tso Cc: Jonathan Corbet , ksummit@lists.linux.dev Subject: Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Coping with the new-developer flood Message-ID: <2026080651-bony-hertz-bfb6@gregkh> References: <87y0ekm9nw.fsf@trenco.lwn.net> Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: ksummit@lists.linux.dev List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: On Thu, Aug 06, 2026 at 11:42:33AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > On Wed, Aug 05, 2026 at 05:26:11PM -0500, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > > Do we need some sort of more organized onboarding structure and, if so, > > are we able to create and sustain it? > > > > At a minimum, one could imagine a bot that notices a patch posted by > > somebody who has not been seen before and responds with a "Welcome! > > Here's how we do things here" email. > > I wonder if we could make the bot more sophisticated than just sending > a welcome message. If the patch is white-space damaged, or doesn't > apply against upstream (or if there are indications that it was > applied against an LTS branch without an explicit LTS tag or something > indicating that it is a backport), one could imagine having the bot > sending a newer contributor a more specific set of constructive > criticisms. > > Some, of this could, perhaps be something that we could add to > Sashiko, with an eye towards giving a more friendly message. Just > today I had to let a new submitter know that they had sent a > white-space damaged patch, and given they were using a gmail.com > e-mail address, it could be possible to send a more useful message. > (Since I was in a hurry, I just pointed them at the Submitting Patches > document, which is rather long. :-) I have a much-used "bot" that I use for the "common" problems with patches sent to my subsystems. Here's the raw text below if others want to cut/paste from it and adapt it for their subsystems. ---------------------- Hi, This is the friendly patch-bot of Greg Kroah-Hartman. You have sent him a patch that has triggered this response. He used to manually respond to these common problems, but in order to save his sanity (he kept writing the same thing over and over, yet to different people), I was created. Hopefully you will not take offence and will fix the problem in your patch and resubmit it so that it can be accepted into the Linux kernel tree. You are receiving this message because of the following common error(s) as indicated below: - Your patch breaks the build. - Your patch contains warnings and/or errors noticed by the scripts/checkpatch.pl tool. - Your patch is malformed (tabs converted to spaces, linewrapped, etc.) and can not be applied. Please read the file, Documentation/process/email-clients.rst in order to fix this. - Your patch was attached, please place it inline so that it can be applied directly from the email message itself. - Your patch does not have a Signed-off-by: line. Please read the kernel file, Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst and resend it after adding that line. Note, the line needs to be in the body of the email, before the patch, not at the bottom of the patch or in the email signature. - Your patch was sent privately to Greg. Kernel development is done in public, please always cc: a public mailing list with a patch submission. Using the tool, scripts/get_maintainer.pl on the patch will tell you what mailing list to cc. - Your patch did many different things all at once, making it difficult to review. All Linux kernel patches need to only do one thing at a time. If you need to do multiple things (such as clean up all coding style issues in a file/driver), do it in a sequence of patches, each one doing only one thing. This will make it easier to review the patches to ensure that they are correct, and to help alleviate any merge issues that larger patches can cause. - Your patch did not apply to any known trees that Greg is in control of. Possibly this is because you made it against Linus's tree, not the linux-next tree, which is where all of the development for the next version of the kernel is at. Please refresh your patch against the linux-next tree, or even better yet, the development tree specified in the MAINTAINERS file for the subsystem you are submitting a patch for, and resend it. - You sent multiple patches, yet no indication of which ones should be applied in which order. Greg could just guess, but if you are receiving this email, he guessed wrong and the patches didn't apply. Please read the section entitled "The canonical patch format" in the kernel file, Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst for a description of how to do this so that Greg has a chance to apply these correctly. - You did not specify a description of why the patch is needed, or possibly, any description at all, in the email body. Please read the section entitled "The canonical patch format" in the kernel file, Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst for what is needed in order to properly describe the change. - You did not write a descriptive Subject: for the patch, allowing Greg, and everyone else, to know what this patch is all about. Please read the section entitled "The canonical patch format" in the kernel file, Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst for what a proper Subject: line should look like. - It looks like you did not use your "real" name for the patch on either the Signed-off-by: line, or the From: line (both of which have to match). Please read the kernel file, Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst for how to do this correctly. - This looks like a new version of a previously submitted patch, but you did not list below the --- line any changes from the previous version. Please read the section entitled "The canonical patch format" in the kernel file, Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst for what needs to be done here to properly describe this. - You sent a patch that has been sent multiple times in the past few days, and is identical to ones that has been recently rejected. Please always look at the mailing list traffic to determine if you are duplicating other people's work. - You have marked a patch with a "Fixes:" tag for a commit that is in an older released kernel, yet you do not have a cc: stable line in the signed-off-by area at all, which means that the patch will not be applied to any older kernel releases. To properly fix this, please follow the documented rules in the Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst file for how to resolve this. If you wish to discuss this problem further, or you have questions about how to resolve this issue, please feel free to respond to this email and Greg will reply once he has dug out from the pending patches received from other developers. thanks, greg k-h's patch email bot