Re: linux-api scope (Re: [PATCH v2 11/22] media: dvb-frontend invoke enable/disable_source handlers)

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

[expanding the CC a little]

Hi Andy, (and Shuah)

On 4 February 2016 at 05:51, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [cc list heavily trimmed]
>
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 8:03 PM, Shuah Khan <shuahkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Change dvb frontend to check if tuner is free when
>> device opened in RW mode. Call to enable_source
>> handler either returns with an active pipeline to
>> tuner or error if tuner is busy. Tuner is released
>> when frontend is released calling the disable_source
>> handler.
>
> As an actual subscriber to linux-api, I prefer for the linux-api list
> to be lowish-volume and mostly limited to API-related things.  Is this
> API related?  Do people think that these series should be sent to
> linux-api?

I think not, and I'd like to stem the flood of mail to the list.
There's two things that we could do:

1. Shuah, I know we talked about this in the past, and it made some
sense to me at the time for kselftest to use linux-api@, but maybe
it's time to create a dedicated list, and move the traffic there? It'd
help focus the traffic of linux-api more on its original purpose.

2. However, I think the bigger cause of the flood is the change made
to MAINTAINERS by Josh's commit
ea8f8fc8631d9f890580a94d57a18bfeb827fa2e:

+ABI/API
+L:     linux-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
+F:     Documentation/ABI/
+F:     include/linux/syscalls.h
+F:     include/uapi/
+F:     kernel/sys_ni.c

The change was well-intentioned (I Acked it), but folk run
scripts/get-maintainers.pl without thinking too much about its output
and add all of the resulting lists and CCs to their patch submissions.
This means we get a lot of useless noise relating to drivers and
unrelated Documentation changes, and actually miss some of the really
important changes (e.g., extensions of system calls; and new /proc
entries tend to get lost in the noise). Furthermore, people doing
things such as adding new system calls often don't tun
scripts/get-maintainers.pl it seems. Certainly, I have to often enough
remind peple to CC linux-api when adding new system calls.

I'll craft a patch to trim the MAINTAINERS entry.

Cheers,

Michael




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-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/