Re: linus-next: improving functional testing for to-be-merged pull requests

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2024 at 12:44, Sasha Levin <sashal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 02:36:39PM -0400, Liam R. Howlett wrote:
> >
> >Would it be difficult to catch branches that change things outside their
> >scope without correct SOB/RB/Acks?  Asking for a friend...
>
> Up to the guy in charge... I don't want to attempt and monitor a policy
> that won't be enforced :)
>
> If Linus wants to add this to the workflow (which is doable), then an
> explicit ack would be great.

Has this been a huge deal?  There are things like ABI changes
(function renames, dropping or adding arguments etc etc) that will
inevitably end up tree-wide, and honestly, it would often be totally
frustrating trying to get acks from every maintainer.

Is it hugely common? No. But still, I'm not convinced there is a sane
model for "outside their scope".

I mean, sure, if the change comes from an individual driver or
filesystem or something like that, then it generally has no business
touching anything else. So it *can* be an issue, but I don't see how
to sanely automate this kind of thing without it becoming a potential
huge annoyance.

Maybe other people don't mind, but I personally hate false positives
that you are then supposed to ignore when appropriate. It just makes
people ignore the things they *should* care about.

                 Linus