Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH v2 3/3] libnvdimm, MAINTAINERS: Maintainer Entry Profile

Martin K. Petersen
2019-09-16T17:09:41Z

Dan,

>> One pet peeve I have is that people are pretty bad at indicating the
>> intended target tree. I often ask for it in private mail but the
>> practice doesn't seem to stick. I spend a ton of time guessing whether a
>> patch is a fix for a new feature in the x+1 queue or a fix for the
>> current release. It is not always obvious.
>
> The Fixes tag doesn't help?

Always.

> Of course, you've never asked me or anyone on kernel-newbies that
> question. We don't normally know the answer either. I do always try
> to figure it out for networking, but it's kind of a pain in the butt
> and I mess up surpisingly often for how much effort I put into getting
> it right.

It's not a big issue for your patches. These are inevitably fixes and
I'll pick an appropriate tree depending on where we are in the cycle,
how likely one is to hit the issue, whether the driver is widely used,
etc.

Vendor driver submissions, however, are generally huge. Sometimes 50+
patches per submission window. And during this window I often get on the
order of 10 to 20 patches for the same driver in the fixes tree. It is
not always easy to determine whether a bug fix series is for one tree or
the other.

--
Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering