Re: [patch 14/25] SCSI: use irq_handler_t where appropriate

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>]

On Thu, 2007-05-24 at 08:17 -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> On Thu, 24 May 2007 09:04:06 -0500 James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2007-05-24 at 01:51 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > > James Bottomley wrote:
> > > > It's not a bug fix or even an enhancement.  Historically, it is quite
> > > > difficult to get maintainers to ack these ... particularly if you don't
> > > > cc them.
> > > 
> > > If neither you nor the maintainers are reading and responding to patches 
> > > sent to linux-scsi, I don't think the problem is sitting in my chair.
> > 
> > Oh come off it ... You've been around long enough to know that
> > maintainers are not always watching everything ... it would be nice if
> > they were, but to give a patch the best shot at review, you try to
> > attract their attention.  Specifically, in this case, you should cc the
> > maintainers and you should have a subject line explaining that you are
> > modifying their driver.  It is very easy to ignore a patch that's simply
> > waved at the SCSI list with a generic subject line.
> 
> I can understand subsystem maintainers ignoring lkml, but ignoring
> the subsystem mailing list makes no sense to me, especially if the
> subject contains "[PATCH]".

SCSI is a slightly different subsystem from almost any other in the
kernel.  It has something like 15 active driver maintainers plus at
least another 15-25 periodically active ones.  Most (but not all) driver
maintainers are employed by the company who produces the board/chip and
tend to be overloaded with a lot of non-linux work.  Requiring acks for
maintained drivers is a courtesy to make sure we don't get maintainers
spending time trying to resolve conflicts.  I'm not mandating any
particular method of getting acks, just noting that cc'ing maintainers
and having specific subject lines mentioning the driver is a reasonable
way of getting them to notice.

James