On Fri, Mar 03, 2023 at 06:30:02PM +0000, Nick Alcock wrote:

On 3 Mar 2023, Mark Brown outgrape:

quoted

on.  If there are no strong interdependencies then it's generally
simplest to just send the patches separately to avoid any
possible confusion.

The cover letter was sent to every related mailing list (or at least it
was for patch series 2 and 5+: scripting problems blocked 3 and 4,
sorry), which is what the LWN article on big patch series which I'm
following recommended: <https://lwn.net/Articles/585782/>. I didn't want
to spam actual maintainers with more info than that, since presumably
they follow related-according-to-maintainer.pl lists anyway.

As for copying everyone on a 121-patch monster like this... well, I
think everyone would have wanted to throttle me, and I'm not sure they'd
have been wrong.

So given that there's no depenencies between the patches this
seems like a good candidate for not sending as a series in the
first place.

I don't think anyone has previously suggested making it 121 individual
patches with no cover letter whatsoever. As it is, those series that
accidentally went out without cover letters properly Cc:ed confused some
maintainers because of the lack of the cover letter. My apologies.

It's really quite common for people to just send lots of
individual patches when there's no interdependencies - a lot of
the generated cleanups do that.

It does seem this is an area where I can't please everyone. Some people
don't want to be Cc:ed, others want everyone Cc:ed on all of them: some
people want series, others want individual patches for everyone. I can't
do both. Sorry about that.

The important thing isn't so much the specific thing as making it
clear what's going on - if you send a series with no information
about the how the series should be handled it's unclear what's
going on.