Re: [GIT PULL] target: Updates for v3.3-rc1 (round 1)

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

On Tue, 2012-01-10 at 11:33 -0800, Nicholas A. Bellinger wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-01-10 at 19:19 +0000, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> > 2012/1/10 Nicholas A. Bellinger <nab@linux-iscsi.org>
> > > *) Initial merge for the SRP target (ib_srpt) fabric module (bart)
> > 
> > As far as I know the last time that patch was posted for review is
> > November 4 (http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.scsi.target.devel/420).
> > The date of the ib_srpt commit is December 16
> > (http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/nab/target-pending.git;a=commitdiff;h=a42d985bd5b234da8b61347a78dc3057bf7bb94d).
> > The two patches aren't identical. That makes me wonder whether that
> > patch should have been reposted for review ?
> > 
> 
> Hi Bart,
> 
> The changes since the Nov 4 RFC are listed in the patch commit log:
> 
> ib_srpt: Make compilation with BUG=n proceed`
> ib_srpt: Use new target_core_fabric.h include
> ib_srpt: Check hex2bin() return code to silence build warning
> 
> These are all very minor and did not warrant another full RFC posting.

They might not warrant a full RFC reposting, but individually they
should have been posted to the list, so Bart is right.

As a maintainer, there shouldn't be a patch in your tree that hasn't
been over the mailing list once.  This is for three reasons

     1. Git is a great source control tool, bit it doesn't hugely
        facilitate review.  Even virtuoso git users find it easier to
        read and reply to emailed patches for this purpose
     2. Not everyone in our community is a wholesale git user.  For
        them, email might be the only way they get to see a patch, so
        using git alone lowers our pool of reviewers (and reviewers are
        the species we most need to encourage)
     3. Enforcing the rule that everything is emailed first can save you
        from the maintainers curse:  the temptation to bung in that last
        little "obvious" fix just before you send your tree to Linus
        which later turns out to cause huge regressions and much
        heartache.

You don't have to endlessly repost patch series, just make sure that
small updates get posted for review and comment before they get applied.

James