Re: about the flood of trivial patches and the Code of Conflict (was: Re: [PATCH 19/25] sched: Use bool function return values of true/false not 1/0)

[Ingo Molnar]

s/Conduct/Conflict

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> * Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2015-03-31 at 11:03 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > * Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 04:46:17PM -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> > > > > Use the normal return values for bool functions
> > > > > 
> > > > > Update the other sets of ret in try_wait_for_completion.
> > > > 
> > > > I'm missing a why; why are you doing this?
> > > 
> > > Let me guess: Joe Perches is suffering from 'trivialititis': a 
> > > sickness that prevents a non-newbie kernel developer from raising 
> > > beyond churning out a flood of trivial patches and creating 
> > > unnecessary churn for other developers with these borderline 
> > > useless patches?
> > >
> > > Linux is a meritocracy, not a bureaucracy.
> > 
> > Good morning Ingo.
> > 
> > As you are a signer of that "code of conflict" patch,
> > I'll be mildly amused, but not surprised, if you are
> > among the first participants.
> 
> So as a reply to my joke directed against your (costly: see below) 
> flood of trivial and somewhat bureaucratic patches that PeterZ 
> complained about, which reply of mine aimed at getting you to change 
> from your many years old pattern of producing trivial patches towards 
> producing more substantial patches, causes you to issue a threat of 
> bureaucratic action against me?
> 
> Wow.
> 
> I'd also like to stress that I don't think you have answered PeterZ's 
> legitimate technical question adequately: what are the technological 
> justifications for doing this 25 patches series - returning 0/1 or 
> true/false is clearly a matter of taste unless mixed within the same 
> function. In fact what are your technological justifications for doing 
> so many trivial patches in general?
> 
> Please don't bother producing and sending me such trivial patches 
> unless they:
> 
>   - fix a real bug (in which case they are not trivial patches anymore)
> 
>   - or are part of a larger (non-trivial!) series that does some real,
>     substantial work on this code that tries to:
> 
>          - fix existing code
> 
>          - speed up existing code
> 
>          - or expand upon existing code with new code
> 
>          - turn totally unreadable code into something readable
>            (for example in drivers/staging/)
> 
> The reason I'm not applying your patch is that trivial patches, even 
> if they seem borderline useful, with no substance following them up, 
> often have more costs than benefits:
> 
>  - they lead to pointless churn:
> 
>     - they take up Git space (and bandwidth) for no good reason
> 
>     - they slow down bisection of real changes
> 
>     - they take up (valuable!) reviewer bandwidth
> 
>     - they take up maintainer bandwidth
> 
> there's literally a million borderline pointless cleanup patches that 
> could be done on the kernel, and we really don't want to add a million 
> commits to the kernel tree...
> 
> I don't think your 25 patches long trivial series is defensible from a 
> kernel contributor who has thousands of commits in the mainline kernel 
> already: you are clearly not a kernel newbie anymore who needs to 
> learn the ropes through simple patches and whose initially trivial 
> patches maintainers will nurture in the hope of gaining a future 
> contributor who will be a net benefit in the future...
> 
> I also think you are beginning to abuse the openness of kernel 
> maintainers to apply trivial patches, and I don't think it's useful to 
> point out such abuse before it gets worse.
> 
> My (repeated) advice to you is that you should try to raise beyond 
> newbie patches and write something more substantial that helps Linux:
> 
>  - take a look at the many bugs on bugzilla.kernel.org and try to 
>    analyze, reproduce or fix them
> 
>  - go read kernel code, understand it and try to find real bugs.
> 
>  - go test the latest kernels and find bugs in it. The fresher the 
>    code, the more likely it is that it has bugs.
> 
>  - go read kernel code and try to expand upon it
> 
> Fortunately it's not hard to contribute to the kernel once you are 
> beyond the 'newbie' status: there's literally an infinite amount of 
> work to be done on the kernel, and I welcome productive contributions 
> - but churning out trivial patches with no substantial patches 
> following them up is not productive and in fact (as pointed out above) 
> they are harmful once you are not a totally fresh newbie kernel 
> developer anymore...
> 
> Pointing out this truth and protecting against such abusive flood of 
> trivial patches is not against the 'Code of Conflict' I signed.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 	Ingo
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