Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for 4.14 015/161] printk: Add console owner and waiter logic to load balance console writes

Sasha Levin
2018-04-17T13:45:59Z

On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 02:24:54PM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
>Back to the trend. Last week I got autosel mails even for
>patches that were still being discussed, had issues, and
>were far from upstream:
>
> https://lkml.kernel.org/r/DM5PR2101MB1032AB19B489D46B717B50D4FBBB0@DM5PR2101MB1032.namprd21.prod.outlook.com
> https://lkml.kernel.org/r/DM5PR2101MB10327FA0A7E0D2C901E33B79FBBB0@DM5PR2101MB1032.namprd21.prod.outlook.com
>
>It might be a good idea if the mail asked to add Fixes: tag
>or stable mailing list. But the mail suggested to add the
>unfinished patch into stable branch directly (even before
>upstreaming?).

I obviously didn't suggest that this patch will go in -stable before
it's upstream.

I've started doing those because some folks can't be arsed to reply to a
review request for a patch that is months old. I found that if I send
these mails while the discussion is still going on I'd get a much better
response rate from people.

If you think any of these patches should go in stable there were two
ways about it:

- You end up adding the -stable tag yourself, and it would follow the
usual route where Greg picks it up.
- You reply to that mail, and the patch would wait in a list until my
script notices it made it upstream, at which point it would get
queued for stable.

>Now, there are only hand full of printk patches in each
>release, so it is still doable. I just do not understand
>how other maintainers, from much more busy subsystems,
>could cope with this trend.
>
>By other words. If you want to automatize patch nomination,
>you might need to automatize also patch review. Or you need
>to keep the patch rate low. This might mean to nominate
>only important and rather trivial fixes.

I also have an effort to help review the patches. See what I'm working
on for the xfs folks:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/29/1113

Where in addition to build tests I'd also run each commit, for each
stable kernel through a set of xfstests and provide them along with the
mail.

So yes, I'm aware that the volume of patches is huge, but there's not
much I can do about it because it's just a subset of the kernel's patch
volume and since the kernel gets more and more patches each release, the
volume of stable commits is bound to grow as well.