Re: Announce: Linux-next (Or Andrew's dream :-))

Linus Torvalds
2008-02-12T21:37:22Z

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Greg KH wrote:
>
> Yes, I agree, there are lots of examples of this, but the overall
> majority are reviewed by 2 people at least (or sure as hell should be,
> maybe we need to bring into existance the "reviewed-by" marking to
> ensure this.)

Well, I don't really "review" any patches that come through Andrew. What I
do is:

- global search-and-replace Andrew's "acked-by:" with one that is both
him and me (that way I make sure that I _only_ sign off on patches that
he has signed off on!)

- look through all the commit *messages* (but not patches). This
sometimes involves also editing up grammar etc - some of those messages
just make me wince - but it also tends to include things like adding
commit one-liner information if only a git commit ID is mentioned etc.

- and only for areas that I feel competent in, I look at the patches too.

So, to take an example, when Andrew passes on uml patches that only touch
arch/um and include/asm-um, my sign-off does not mean *any* kind of review
at all. It's purely a sign that it's passed the sign-off requirements
properly.

When it comes to VM issues or other things, things are different, and I
actually review the patch (and occasionally send it back with "nope, I'm
not applying this"). But for stuff that comes through Andrew, that's
probably less than a quarter of the patches. And I don't mark the ones
I've reviewed specially in any way.

And I suspect I'm not at all alone in this. People simply have maintainers
they trust (and _need_ to trust in order to not become a bottleneck).

Linus