Re: [PATCH v1 1/2] PCI: Document patch submission hints

Lukas Wunner
2018-07-30T14:31:36Z

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 10:59:46AM -0500, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> But on reflection, I think the overall value of this writeup is
> minimal. It's a lot of repetition of things already documented
> elsewhere and most of it boils down to "pay attention to existing
> practice and don't do things differently unless you're innovating and
> adding value." That *should* be obvious, and if it's not, I doubt
> that adding one more thing to read is going to make it more obvious.

So my opinion is that your writeup does contain valid points that are
worth documenting: For an open source project, a top priority is to
attract and retain contributors who improve the bus factor, who keep
the code base alive and maintained, thereby avoiding bit rot.

Knowledge diffusion, including documentation of best practices and
conventions, goes a long way towards that goal. Your writeup was
mainly from a maintainer perspective: "consistency makes maintenance
easier". But consistency is also valuable from a contributor
perspective: It makes it easier to dive into a code base and find
your way around, and that includes changelogs in the git history.

There are important bits of knowledge in the writeup, if those can
be distilled, the result would very much be valuable to have in the tree.

Example:

> I generally use
> "PCI/XXX" for things in the core (mostly capabilities like MSI, AER,
> DPC, etc) and "PCI: xxx:" for drivers (shpchp, pciehp, etc).

That was in fact unknown to me.

If you find it difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a contributor,
I could try to rework the document and distill the points I find important.

Thanks,

Lukas