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

Well, it seems to be three years of someone's time plus the maintainer
review time and series disruption of nearly a thousand patches.  Let's
be conservative and assume the producer worked about 30% on the series
and it takes about 5-10 minutes per patch to review, merge and for
others to rework existing series.  So let's say it's cost a person year
of a relatively junior engineer producing the patches and say 100h of
review and application time.  The latter is likely the big ticket item
because it's what we have in least supply in the kernel (even though
it's 20x vs the producer time).

How are you arriving at such numbers? It is a total of ~200 trivial lines.

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.

If some company does not want to pay for that, that's fine, but they
don't get to be maintainers and claim `Supported`.

Cheers,
Miguel