[Ksummit-discuss] [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers

[James Bottomley]

On Tue, 2014-05-27 at 23:22 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> 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".

Look, in the immortal words of Bill Clinton: I feel your pain.  However,
having it all be the Maintainer's fault isn't scalable.

> > 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)?

To paraphrase Martin: hell, yes.

> > 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.

So please help me.  I have quite a few distro people on my list, it
would be enormously helpful if they reviewed a few vendor patches,
perhaps suggesting workable changelogs in the review ... it doesn't have
to be every patch, which is unmanageable, but a few to act as training
wheels.

James