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
2015-04-07T09:27:38Z

* 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

Not to mention that one of your trivial patches in this series
actually introduced a bug:

lkml.kernel.org/r/1427867186.18175.60.camel@perches.com

Which additional risk adds to the cost side of the equation as well.

Thanks,

Ingo