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

Daniel Phillips
2002-01-29T12:29:22Z

On January 29, 2002 02:54 pm, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> If a patch gets ignored 33 times in a row then perhaps the person doing
> the patch should first think really hard about the following 4 issues:
>
> - cleanliness
> - concept
> - timing
> - testing
>
> a violation of any of these items can cause patch to be dropped *without
> notice*. Face it, it's not Linus' task to teach people how to code or how
> to write correct patches. Sure, he still does teach people most of the
> time, but you cannot *expect* him to be able to do it 100% of the time.

While I agree in general with most of your remarks, I think you're being a
little too glib here. Consider my patch to fix group descriptor corruption
in Ext2, submitted half a dozen times to Linus and other maintainers over the
course of two years, which was clearly explained, passed scrutiny on
ext2-devel and lkml, fixed a real problem that really bit people and which
I'd been running myself over the entire period. Which one of cleanliness,
concept, timing or testing did I violate?

If the answer is 'none of the above', then what is wrong with this picture?

--
Daniel