Re: howto get a patch merged (WAS: Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23)

Ingo Molnar
2007-07-25T16:07:43Z

* Kacper Wysocki <kacperw@online.no> wrote:

> [snip howto get a patch merged]

> > But a "here is a solution, take it or leave it" approach, before
> > having communicated the problem to the maintainer and before having
> > debugged the problem is the wrong way around. It might still work
> > out fine if the solution is correct (especially if the patch is
> > small and obvious), but if there are any non-trivial tradeoffs
> > involved, or if nontrivial amount of code is involved, you might see
> > your patch at the end of a really long (and constantly growing)
> > waiting list of patches.
>
> Is that what happened with swap prefetch these two years? The approach
> has been wrong?

i dont know - but one of the maintainers of the code (Nick) says that he
asked for but did not get debug feedback:

> > > And yet despite my repeated pleas, none of those people has yet
> > > spent a bit of time with me to help analyse what is happening.

Con, the maintainer of -ck, certainly has (or had, when he maintained
it) enough clout to coordinate such an effort between non-developer -ck
users and the MM maintainers. Maybe he attempted to do that and has
tried to provide debug feedback to MM maintainers?

Ingo