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)

Rafael J. Wysocki
2015-04-08T23:13:08Z

On Tuesday, April 07, 2015 09:28:03 AM Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 02:31:23PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > >
> > > As per the other branch of this tree; an emphatic NO to that. The
> > > trivial tree is not a backdoor to bypass maintainers. Actual code
> > > changes do not get to go through any tree but the maintainer tree unless
> > > explicitly ACKed.
> >
> > Well, practically speaking, that would make changes like the recent
> > clockevents_notify() removal very difficult to carry out. Also there is
> > some natural cross-talk between certain subsystems.
>
> I would not call the clockevents_notify() series "trivial". More advanced
> clean ups that are system wide, would be different, because you are changing
> the way the code works. The maintainers must be Cc'd, but sometimes I find
> those changes are very hard to get acks from everyone. But again, the change
> is a non trivial clean up and has other reasons for going in than just to
> make the code look nice.
>
> >
> > Different matter is the real value of tree-wide cleanup changes. If code is
> > old enough it often is better to leave it alone, even though it may be doing
> > things that we don't usually do nowadays.
>
> Or maybe it's a good time to rewrite that code such that everyone can understand
> it today ;-)
>
> >
> > Or things that new patches are not supposed to do, for that matter, so
> > I generally don't like the "checkpatch.pl error fix" changes in the old code.
> >
>
> I totally agree with that. But for non trivial clean ups, old code should be
> updated too.

Well, there still is some risk of introducing real bugs this way (I *have* seen
"trivial cleanups" that broke things) and is it really worth it?

Besides, old code is somewhat like an ancient building. Yes, it needs to be
kept in a good shape, but you won't replace bricks in it just because they are
old, will you?

Rafael