Re: [PATCH -next 005/491] ARM/UNIPHIER ARCHITECTURE: Use fallthrough;

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 02:37:31AM -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> As I have suggested a few times, better still
> would be to have a mechanism for scripted patches
> applied possibly as single treewide patch.
> 
> Likely applied only at an -rc1.
> 
> The stated negatives to a treewide mechanism
> have been difficulty to backport to -stable.

Any time we do a massive, disruptive change to the code base, it's
going to cause problems to -stable.  It means that bug fix patches
won't necessarily auto-apply, and some will require manual fixups
afterwards

Given that this change doesn't really fix any bugs, I'd have to ask
the question --- is it *worth* it?  We really need to apply a certain
amount of cost/benefit analysis around this.

If it were really important, the thing we could do is to apply a
single treewide patch at some point after the merge window.  I'd
suggest after -rc2, myself, but reasonable people can differ.  And
then, if it were *really* important we could run the same script on
the stable kernels.

But for changing "/* fallthrough */" to "fallthrough;"

Does this ***really*** matter?  Why are we tying ourselves up in knots
trying to do this all at once?

					- Ted