Re: Determining corresponding mainline patch for stable patches Re: [PATCH 5.10 125/135] drm/i915: avoid uninitialised var in eb_parse()

On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 11:46:38AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 01:19:53PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:

quoted

Plus this adds some cognitive load on those writing these patches, which
increases the global effort. It's already difficult enough to figure the
appropriate Cc list when writing a fix, let's not add more burden in this
chain.

...

I'm also defending this on other projects. I find it important that
efforts are reasonably shared. If tolerating 1% failures saves 20%
effort on authors and adds 2% work on recipients, that's a net global
win. You never completely eliminate mistakes anyway, regardless of the
cost.

The only way I can see to square the circle would be if there was some
kind of script that added enough value that people naturally use it
because it saves *them* time, and it automatically inserts the right
commit metadata in some kind of standardized way.

I've been starting to use b4, and that's a great example of a workflow
that saves me time, and standardizes things as a very nice side
effect.  So perhaps the question is there some kind of automation that
saves 10-20% effort for authors *and* improves the quality of the
patch metadata for those that choose to use the script?

A script/tool does generate the metadata in the "correct" way, as that
is what Sasha and I use.  It is the issue for when people do it on their
own for various reasons and do not just point us at an upstream commit
that can cause issues.  In those cases, people wouldn't be using any
script anyway, so there's nothing really to do here.

thanks,

greg k-h