Re: [PATCH v2] docs: submitting-patches: Clarify half-baked review tags

[Krzysztof Kozlowski]

On 05/11/2026 10:26, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 05, 2026 at 10:12:00AM +0100, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
>> On 05/11/2026 10:06, Wolfram Sang wrote:
>>>
>>>> Reviewed-by even with the "# subpart" still appears in person's credits
>>>> and reviewing entire patch of 700 lines of diff code (like Frank's SPI
>>>> patch) is not the same as 10 diff codes for one driver.
>>>
>>> Yes, if you want to spoil that, you'd need to introduce
>>>
>>> 	Partly-reviewed-by: ...
>>>
>>> or something.
>>
>> Ack is for that, no need for a new tag, quoting:
>>
>> "Acked-by.... user may not have carried out a technical review of the
>> patch, yet they may be satisfied ..."
>>
>> "Reviewed-by:, instead, indicates that *the patch* has been reviewed and
>> found acceptable according to the Reviewer's Statement:"
>>
>> Note that there is little sense in reviewing - as in statement of
>> oversight credit review - pieces of patch in context I discuss here,
>> e.g. one big complex rework combined with updates of drivers. Who cares
>> about the drivers? The complex rework is important and should be
>> reviewed, but people skip bigger picture and put their stamp of approval.
> 
> Nice, and what as a particular piece maintainer I should do if somebody
> created some helper somewhere (not Cc'ing me), waited to a cycle and started
> cleaning up or refactor the drivers based on that API? Basically I was stand
> in front of a fact, I may tell NAK to that, but what should we do if half of
> the kernel will use new API, half will use old one due to disagreements on
> implementation, naming, et cetera? Rb in this sense tells that I have reviewed
> the refactoring part that has been done on a piece that I'm in charge for and

Do the review, no one questions that.

Statement of oversight, thus tag, how expressed in the docs applies
though to entire patch.

> it looks good. Breaking the flow or behaviour might have been done on the
> upper layer for a bigger number of users.

Best regards,
Krzysztof