On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 07:58:06AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:

On Mon, 2020-11-23 at 15:19 +0100, Miguel Ojeda wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 11:36 PM James Bottomley
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

It's not about the risk of the changes it's about the cost of
implementing them.  Even if you discount the producer time (which
someone gets to pay for, and if I were the engineering manager, I'd
be unhappy about), the review/merge/rework time is pretty
significant in exchange for six minor bug fixes.  Fine, when a new
compiler warning comes along it's certainly reasonable to see if we
can benefit from it and the fact that the compiler people think
it's worthwhile is enough evidence to assume this initially.  But
at some point you have to ask whether that assumption is supported
by the evidence we've accumulated over the time we've been using
it.  And if the evidence doesn't support it perhaps it is time to
stop the experiment.

Maintainers routinely review 1-line trivial patches, not to mention
internal API changes, etc.

We're also complaining about the inability to recruit maintainers:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/hard_to_find_linux_maintainers_says_torvalds/

And burn out:

http://antirez.com/news/129

The whole crux of your argument seems to be maintainers' time isn't
important so we should accept all trivial patches ... I'm pushing back
on that assumption in two places, firstly the valulessness of the time
and secondly that all trivial patches are valuable.

You're assuming burn out or recruitment problems is due to patch workload
or too many "trivial" patches.

In my experience, "other maintainers" is by far the biggest cause of
burn out for my kernel maintenance work.

Certainly arguing with a maintainer about some obviously-correct patch
series must be a good example of this.


Sean