[Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

Jiri Kosina jkosina at suse.cz
Tue May 27 21:22:16 UTC 2014


On Wed, 28 May 2014, James Bottomley wrote:

> > With my distro person hat on, I'd really like to call at least for pushing 
> > driver maintainers much harder to be a lot more verbose in their 
> > changelogs (if splitting the commits into smaller chunks is not an 
> > option). Without that, trying to find out what change might potentially 
> > cause what kind of behavior turns into a nightmare.
> > 
> > For an example picked up in a completely in random, look at this one
> > 
> > 	commit 1ba981fd3ad1f91b8bb205ce6aac6aad45f2fa7a
> > 	Author: James Smart <james.smart at emulex.com>
> > 	Date:   Thu Feb 20 09:56:45 2014 -0500
> > 
> > 	    [SCSI] lpfc 8.3.45: Incorporated support of a low-latency io path
> 
> Well, I don't disagree, but getting driver writers to supply changelogs
> is hard.  

I know. But there just a one single force on planet Earth that can make 
this happen, and that's maintainer saying "No, you have to do better".

> For the ones I understand, I've rewritten (or even composed) quite a few 
> change logs myself because I often don't get anything usable back when I 
> request a rewrite.

Are you implying that Linux is still not in a position to force HW vendor 
companies to rather invest 30 man-minutes in order to have a proper 
changelog and driver merged in Linus' tree compared to receiving bad 
public press when they are being rejected (especially for such negligible 
reason as changelog text)?

> My intolerance for bad changelogs is high in shared code, but for single 
> vendor drivers it's often hard just to get the code and keep it in sync, 
> so I have a lot lower tolerance.

Unfortunately this doesn't make much of a difference for distro vendors 
when chasing unknown bugs.

Thanks,

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs


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