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

Ingo Molnar
2015-04-07T11:19:03Z

* Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 11:12:46AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > Pointing out this truth and protecting against such abusive flood of
> > trivial patches is not against the code of conduct I signed.
>
> I totally agree, it's not "against" the code of conflict that I
> helped write.
>
> Joe, you know better than to send trivial stuff to maintainers who
> don't want it. Send it through the trivial maintainer for
> subsystems that have expressed annoyance at this, it's not the first
> time this has happened.

I argue that they should not be sent _at all_ in such cases, not even
via the trivial tree: firstly because typically I'll pick up the bits
from the trivial tree as well, and secondly because most of the
arguments I listed against bulk trivial commits (weaker bisectability,
taking up reviewer bandwidth, taking up Git space, etc.) still stand.

Frankly IMHO such a */25 series could be a net negative contribution
when coming from a kernel contributor who has written 2000+ trivial
patches already...

> Some maintainers, like me, are fine with your types of patches, I'd
> stick to those subsystems if you like doing this type of work.

So sending trivial patches for things like totally unreadable code in
say drivers/staging/ is probably OK, as they materially transform the
code and make it more maintainable.

For the rest it can be more harmful than beneficial, for the reasons I
outlined.

Thanks,

Ingo