Re: [PATCH 2/2] suspend: Cleanup calling of power off methods.

Andrew Morton
2005-09-21T18:02:01Z

ebiederm-aS9lmoZGLiVWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org (Eric W. Biederman) wrote:
>
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds-3NddpPZAyC0@public.gmane.org> writes:
>
> > On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Pavel Machek wrote:
> >>
> >> I think you are not following the proper procedure. All the patches
> >> should go through akpm.
>
> Ok. I thought it was fine to send simple and obviously correct bug
> fixes to Linus.

I habitually scoop up patches and will get them into Linus (preferably
after 1-2 -mm cycles) if he ducks them.

> > One issue is that I actually worry that Andrew will at some point be where
> > I was a couple of years ago - overworked and stressed out by just tons and
> > tons of patches.
> >
> > Yes, he's written/modified tons of patch-tracking tools, and the git
> > merging hopefully avoids some of the pressures, but it still worries me.
> > If Andrew burns out, we'll all suffer hugely.
> >
> > I'm wondering what we can do to offset those kinds of issues. I _do_ like
> > having -mm as a staging area and catching some problems there, so going
> > through andrew is wonderful in that sense, but it has downsides.
>
> It is especially challenging for people like me who typically work on
> parts of the kernel without a maintainer. So there frequently isn't
> an intermediate I can submit my patches to.

Yup. And MAINTAINERS has quite a few omissions. I generally know who
should be poked and if there's nobody obvious I have 26000 patches to grep
through to find out who might know a bit about that code. Low-level x86 is
a bit of a problem really because it has many cooks and no obvious chef.

Individual maintainers have differing response times, differing
attentiveness and differing patchloss ratios.

There's also confusion once I've cc'ed a maintainer on a patch over whether
I'll be sending it to Linus or whether I want them to.

If a maintainer has a tree in -mm then I'll autodrop the patch if they
merge it, so there's no confusion there.

If the maintainer says "thanks, merged" and I don't have their tree in -mm
then I'll tend to hang onto the patch indefinitely until it finally hits
-linus. Or I'll eventually forget and merge it up anyway ;)

If the maintainer just acks the patch I'll send it in to Linus.

If the maintainer nacks the patch I'll either drop it or I'll mark it
not-for-merging and hang onto it anwyay, as a reminder that we have some
bug which needs fixing.

If the maintainer has a tree in -mm and doesn't merge the patch I'll hang
onto it and periodically resend to the maintainer until some definite
response comes back.

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