On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 8:18 AM Xie He [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Especially without that, I'm not sure this and the follow-on patch add
much value. Minor code cleanups complicate backports of fixes.

To me this is necessary, because I feel hard to do any development on
un-cleaned-up code. I really don't know how to add my code without
these clean-ups, and even if I managed to do that, I would not be
happy with my code.

And always keeping the user interface and even the code unchanged
contradicts my motivation of contributing to the Linux kernel. All my
contributions are motivated by the hope to clean things up. I'm not an
actual user of any of the code I contribute. If we adhere to the
philosophy of not doing any clean-ups, my contributions would be
meaningless.