Re: wireless-drivers: random cleanup patches piling up

Kalle Valo
2016-01-22T12:21:33Z

Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> writes:

> On Thu, 2016-01-21 at 16:58 +0200, Kalle Valo wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have quite a lot of random cleanup patches from new developers waiting
>> in my queue:
>>
>> https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/?state=10&delegate=25621&order=date
>>
>> (Not all of them are cleanup patches, there are also few patches
>> deferred due to other reasons, but you get the idea.)
>>
>> These cleanup patches usually take quite a lot of my time and I'm
>> starting to doubt the benefit, compared to the time needed to dig
>> through them and figuring out what to apply. And this is of course time
>> away from other patches, so it's slowing down "real" development.
>>
>> I really don't know what to do. Part of me is saying that I just should
>> drop them unless it's reviewed by a more experienced developer but on
>> the other hand this is a good way get new developers onboard.
>>
>> What others think? Are these kind of patches useful?
>
> Some yes, mostly not really.
>
> While whitespace style patches have some small value,
> very few of the new contributors that use tools like
> "scripts/checkpatch.pl -f" on various kernel files
> actually continue on to submit actual defect fixing
> or optimization or code clarity patches.

That's also my experience from maintaining wireless-drivers for a year,
this seems to be a "hit and run" type of phenomenon.

--
Kalle Valo