Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Ingo Molnar wrote:
>  2) you might know that Deja-Vu moment when you look at a new patch that 
>     has been submitted to lkml and you have a strange, weird "feeling" 
>     that there's something wrong about the patch.
> 
>     It's totally subconscious, and you take a closer look and a few
>     seconds later you find a real bug in the code.
> 
>     That "feeling" i believe comes from a fundamental property of how 
>     human vision is connected to the human brain: pattern matching. 
>     Really good programmers have built a "library" of patterns of "good" 
>     and "bad" looking coding practices.
> 
>     If a patch or if a file has a clean _style_, bugs and deeper 
>     structural problems often stand out like a sore thumb. But if the 
[...]

>     The best programmers are the ones who have a good eye for details - 
>     and that subconsciously extends to "style details" too. I've yet to
>     see a _single_ example of a good, experienced kernel programmer who 
>     writes code that looks absolutely careless and sloppy, but which is 
>     top-notch otherwise. (Newbies will make style mistakes a lot more 
>     often - and for them checkpatch is a nice and easy experience at 
>     reading other people's code and trying to learn the style of the 
>     kernel.)
[...]

>  4) there's a psychological effect as well: clean _looking_ code is 
>     more attractive to coders to improve upon. Once the code _looks_ 
>     clean (mechanically), the people with the real structural cleanups 
>     are not far away either. Code that just looks nice is simply more of 
>     a pleasure to work with and to improve, so there's a strong 
>     psychological relationship between the "small, seemingly unimportant 
>     details" cleanups and the real, structural cleanups.

The above deserved to be quoted...  just because I agree with all of it 
so strongly :)

Bugs really do "hide" in ugly code, in part because my brain has been 
optimized to review clean code.

Like everything else in life, one must strike a balance between picking 
style nits with someone's patch, and making honest criticisms of a patch 
because said patch is too "unclean" to be reviewed by anyone.

	Jeff