Re: [PATCH 5/9] PM: suspend_block: Add debugfs file

Randy Dunlap
2010-04-26T00:50:28Z

On 04/25/10 17:45, tytso@mit.edu wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 05:23:06PM -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
>> Yeah, I think that it should be in procfs. It's not strictly closed
>> to new files. (IOW, I'm sure that we can find a bunch of recent files
>> added to procfs.)
>
> That's reasonable (I think the whole /proc is evil crusade is really
> dumb) --- but at the same time, remember how frustrating it is for the
> poor embedded developer who doesn't know who to ignore and what
> "rules" to ignore. They were told months ago /proc is evil, and so
> they moved it to /debugfs, precisely because it was billed as "it has
> no rules". For all I know some helpful community developer may have
> even suggested that to them.
>
> It is extremely frustrating to embedded developers when they get
> conflicting advice, especially in this case, when it was *in* /proc in
> the first place. I'm not sure what to do about this --- my approach
> is to sometimes say, "f*ck it, that's stupid advice", and ship it to
> Linus, who tends to be *much* less of a pendant than most of the
> people who review code --- but that's because I know what I can
> ignore. (I seriously doubt Linus cares much about whether it ends up
> the file ends up /debugfs or /proc, and would take the code either
> way.) But for someone who doesn't understand when you can do this,
> and who tries to follow every single piece of criticism they get, the
> end result can often be a huge amount fo wasted time and frustration.
>
> It would be nice if we could get better at this, since I'm sure this
> is not the only time when embedded code submissions have gotten what
> the submitting developers might consider to be a runaround....

Agreed, we could/should do much better.
Agreed, I'm sure that it is frustrating to the contributors.
Agreed about Linus taking it either way. :)

Thanks for your summary and bringing it up (yet again).

> (And just to be clear, I'm not criticising your commends; my personal
> preference is slightly in favor of /proc, but more than anythign else,
> I consider it a very minor point. I just want to point out that they
> _started_ with the file in /proc and changed it to /debugfs based on
> someone NACK'ing their patch, with a "/proc, eeeeewwww" comment.
> Sometimes I think some code reviewers get too much of a sense of power
> trip by thinking they can NACK other people's code over their own pet
> peeves.... instead of approaching it from a somewhat more collegial
> point of view trying to make the code better. Present company
> excepted, of course. :-)

--
~Randy
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