Re: about the flood of trivial patches and the Code of Conflict (was: Re: [PATCH 19/25] sched: Use bool function return values of true/false not 1/0)

Ingo Molnar
2015-04-07T09:36:29Z

s/Conduct/Conflict

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:

>
> * Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2015-03-31 at 11:03 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > * Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 04:46:17PM -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> > > > > Use the normal return values for bool functions
> > > > >
> > > > > Update the other sets of ret in try_wait_for_completion.
> > > >
> > > > I'm missing a why; why are you doing this?
> > >
> > > Let me guess: Joe Perches is suffering from 'trivialititis': a
> > > sickness that prevents a non-newbie kernel developer from raising
> > > beyond churning out a flood of trivial patches and creating
> > > unnecessary churn for other developers with these borderline
> > > useless patches?
> > >
> > > Linux is a meritocracy, not a bureaucracy.
> >
> > Good morning Ingo.
> >
> > As you are a signer of that "code of conflict" patch,
> > I'll be mildly amused, but not surprised, if you are
> > among the first participants.
>
> So as a reply to my joke directed against your (costly: see below)
> flood of trivial and somewhat bureaucratic patches that PeterZ
> complained about, which reply of mine aimed at getting you to change
> from your many years old pattern of producing trivial patches towards
> producing more substantial patches, causes you to issue a threat of
> bureaucratic action against me?
>
> Wow.
>
> I'd also like to stress that I don't think you have answered PeterZ's
> legitimate technical question adequately: what are the technological
> justifications for doing this 25 patches series - returning 0/1 or
> true/false is clearly a matter of taste unless mixed within the same
> function. In fact what are your technological justifications for doing
> so many trivial patches in general?
>
> Please don't bother producing and sending me such trivial patches
> unless they:
>
> - fix a real bug (in which case they are not trivial patches anymore)
>
> - or are part of a larger (non-trivial!) series that does some real,
> substantial work on this code that tries to:
>
> - fix existing code
>
> - speed up existing code
>
> - or expand upon existing code with new code
>
> - turn totally unreadable code into something readable
> (for example in drivers/staging/)
>
> The reason I'm not applying your patch is that trivial patches, even
> if they seem borderline useful, with no substance following them up,
> often have more costs than benefits:
>
> - they lead to pointless churn:
>
> - they take up Git space (and bandwidth) for no good reason
>
> - they slow down bisection of real changes
>
> - they take up (valuable!) reviewer bandwidth
>
> - they take up maintainer bandwidth
>
> there's literally a million borderline pointless cleanup patches that
> could be done on the kernel, and we really don't want to add a million
> commits to the kernel tree...
>
> I don't think your 25 patches long trivial series is defensible from a
> kernel contributor who has thousands of commits in the mainline kernel
> already: you are clearly not a kernel newbie anymore who needs to
> learn the ropes through simple patches and whose initially trivial
> patches maintainers will nurture in the hope of gaining a future
> contributor who will be a net benefit in the future...
>
> I also think you are beginning to abuse the openness of kernel
> maintainers to apply trivial patches, and I don't think it's useful to
> point out such abuse before it gets worse.
>
> My (repeated) advice to you is that you should try to raise beyond
> newbie patches and write something more substantial that helps Linux:
>
> - take a look at the many bugs on bugzilla.kernel.org and try to
> analyze, reproduce or fix them
>
> - go read kernel code, understand it and try to find real bugs.
>
> - go test the latest kernels and find bugs in it. The fresher the
> code, the more likely it is that it has bugs.
>
> - go read kernel code and try to expand upon it
>
> Fortunately it's not hard to contribute to the kernel once you are
> beyond the 'newbie' status: there's literally an infinite amount of
> work to be done on the kernel, and I welcome productive contributions
> - but churning out trivial patches with no substantial patches
> following them up is not productive and in fact (as pointed out above)
> they are harmful once you are not a totally fresh newbie kernel
> developer anymore...
>
> Pointing out this truth and protecting against such abusive flood of
> trivial patches is not against the 'Code of Conflict' I signed.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ingo