Re: Large Patch Series in Email (was Re: [PATCH 0000/0117] Staging: hv: Driver cleanup)

On Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:07:39 +0100
Alan Cox [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

  Do not send more than 15 patches at once to the vger
  mailing lists!!!

and, accordingly, I went to the trouble of setting up a GitHub
account to host a repo from which I could issue *one* single
PULL request email; I get a little miffed every time my
inbox gets blasted with hundreds of patches when others don't
do similarly.

The problem with dumping stuff that needs review into a git tree is it's
a lot of hassle to review so the advice is kind of outdated in such cases.
It's good advice for things like big new subsystems perhaps but not for
review.

As is always the case social norms evolve faster than the people who feel
compelled to attempt to document them.

There are lots of web archives of the list and it's also not hard to set
up mail tools to shuffle long emails into a folder so there are plenty of
ways to manage and read the lists without being part of it.

And someone should probably updating the CodingStyle document to reflect
reality 8)

Alan

And while at it, maybe add some tipps on how to keep patchseries
small... (people have probably more / better suggestions, please):

- 'submit early, submit often' instead of time based submittal (like...
  oh I hacked 24/7 this week and now is friday, let's see how many
  patches I got...)
- Putting controversial stuff at the end (so at least uncontroversial
  stuff can be applied)
- try to split patchseries into stuff that can be applied independent
  of one another. 
- ...

Regards,
Flo