Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Patch Submission process and Handling Internal Conflict

Jan Kara
2018-01-25T10:28:32Z

On Wed 24-01-18 11:05:44, James Bottomley wrote:
> I've got two community style topics, which should probably be discussed
> in the plenary
>
> 1. Patch Submission Process
>
> Today we don't have a uniform patch submission process across Storage,
> Filesystems and MM. The question is should we (or at least should we
> adhere to some minimal standards). The standard we've been trying to
> hold to in SCSI is one review per accepted non-trivial patch. For us,
> it's useful because it encourages driver writers to review each other's
> patches rather than just posting and then complaining their patch
> hasn't gone in. I can certainly think of a couple of bugs I've had to
> chase in mm where the underlying patches would have benefited from
> review, so I'd like to discuss making the one review per non-trival
> patch our base minimum standard across the whole of LSF/MM; it would
> certainly serve to improve our Reviewed-by statistics.

Well, stuff like fs/reiserfs, fs/udf, fs/isofs, or fs/quota are also parts
of filesystem space but good luck with finding reviewers for those. 99% of
patches I sent in last 10 years were just met with silence (usually there's
0-1 developer interested in that code) so I just push them to have the bug
fixed... I don't feel that as a big problem since the code is reasonably
simple, can be tested, change rate is very low. I just wanted to give that
as an example that above rule does not work for everybody.

For larger filesystems I agree 'at least one reviewer' is a good rule. XFS
is known for this, I believe btrfs pretty much enforces it as well, Ted is
not enforcing this rule for ext4 AFAIK and often it is up to him to review
patches but larger / more complex stuff generally does get reviewed. So
IMO ext4 could use some improvement but I'll leave up to Ted to decide
what's better for ext4.

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR