Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

Ingo Molnar
2002-01-29T13:32:44Z

On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Alan Cox wrote:

> The big stuff is not the problem most times. [...]

oh, i agree, but still the big stuff is that gets quoted in most emails
that try to invent the next big patch submission method ...

> People collecting up patches _does_ help big time for all the small
> fixes.

yes. This started with you and multiple people do it currently.

> Especially ones disciplined enough to keep the originals they applied
> so they can feed stuff on with that tag. If I sent Linus on a patch
> that said "You've missed this fix by Andrew Morton" then Linus knew it
> was probably right for example.

yes. This is what maintainers do. You, when collecting patches for the -ac
tree, are in essence a trusted jolly joker maintainer, very disciplined to
filter the trivial stuff from the nontrivial stuff.

> Start small and your obvious one line diff, or 3 line typo fix will be
> ignored for a decade. There were critical fixes that Linus dropped
> repeatedly between 2.4.2 and 2.4.16 or so which ended up being holes
> in every non-ac based distro.

(while i still do not claim that things are perfect, i'd like to see
specific examples nevertheless.)

Ingo