Re: Stop false review statements

[Hillf Danton <hdanton@sina.com>]

On Sat, 16 May 2026 16:41:43 -0400 Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Sat, May 16, 2026 at 12:15:12PM -0700, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> > > The trouble is that subsystem is mailing list, thus I still got all of
> > > them via b4, which is used to get the discussion.
> > > 
> > > Send them only to the maintainer, for example. Or maintainer + authors.
> > > 
> > > Basically the same as LKP is doing.
> > 
> > There are subsystems which want email reviews to be sent to the subsystem
> > mailing list. In fact, all currently configured email policies came from maintainers,
> > I don’t push anything based on my own preferences.
> 
> In the case of ext4, we have a weekly video conference of the core
> developers, and last week I asked the ext4 core developers whether we
> should start cc'ing the linux-ext4 list.  When I first asked Roman to
> send the reviews to the me as the reviewer and the patch author, I
> didn't want to cc the list in the case people would find annoying.
> 
> The discussion in our video chat was that the quality of the reviews
> was quite good, and the only feedback from the ext4 developers was (a)
> pre-existing problems that were unrelated the patch series, (b)
> sometimes the problems that was pointed out are ones that we don't
> care about (for example, there was a recent comment about readahead
> detection being racy, and that was not ext4-specific, and readahead is
> a hint and if two processes are reading the file at the same
> time.... oh cares how the system handles the hueristic of something
> which is a hint anyway), and (c) while Shashiko is good at pointing
> out problems, its suggestted solutions aren't as good.
> 
> But that's OK, on the whole, the Sashiko is finding problems that
> humans very familiar with code base had missed.

Feel free to add why. In over 80% or just a couple cases a week?

> And so it's certainly better than most human reviewers.
>
Only ext4 specific? In the past 6 months?

> Based on that, the consensus of the ext4 core developers that it would
> be better to make sure that the linux-ext4 list should be cc'ed.  So
> that's a decision that didn't come from me as the ext4 maintainer, but
> after consulting with core ext4 developers and reviewers.
> 
> > I agree, it’s sometimes gets tricky when a patchset is sent to
> > multiple mailing lists, which policy to apply.
> 
> What I would suggest is that if we have a patch which is cc'ed to say,
> linux-xfs, linux-ext4, and linux-fsdevel, as well as a dozen
> developers suggested by get_maintainer.pl, and only the ext4 list has
> requested the reviews, then only send it to the ext4 maintainer, the
> ext4 mailing list, and the patch author.  The Sashiko review doesn't
> need to be cc'ed to the other lists, or the dozen or so other
> maintainers.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 					- Ted
>