Re: b4 review available in master

Geert Uytterhoeven
2026-03-18T07:57:11Z

Hi Konstantin,

On Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at 00:37, Konstantin Ryabitsev <mricon@kernel.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 06:39:54PM -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> > > So it's still behaving a bit strangely, at least that's how it seems to
> > > me. I tried adding comments to a patch, doing my usual trick of
> > > trimming out stuff that is being skipped over.
> >
> > You don't need to do that. Just find the stuff you want commenting on. We'll
> > take care of the rest! :)
> >
> > But, I'm able to reproduce what you're seeing -- trimming content doesn't do
> > the right thing. Let me see if I can make this a lot more relaxed.
>
> The current master should be a lot more forgiving when parsing your comments.
>
> However, I am now curious to hear your feedback. The idea with the review app
> is that you are not really sending an email, you're adding comments to code
> and adding review trailers. The app will render and send that out for you,
> trimming and formatting things nicely so you don't have to do it on your own

I haven't tried b4 review yet, but how do you decide what (not) to trim?
It is not uncommon to explicitly not trim some parts, as they are important
to understand the comment on a seemingly unrelated part.

> (I've noticed that many maintainers don't bother anyway -- there are emails
> with a terse comment at the top and then a huge quoted bottom that is only
> followed by their sig.

IMHO this is very bad behavior: not trimming replies forces everyone
to skim the remainder for more comments.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds