Hi! Lukas, thx for bringing this up. On 13.07.22 09:26, Lukas Bulwahn wrote: > > During some other unrelated clean-up work, I stumbled upon the section > 'If something goes wrong' in Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst > (https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/README.html). > README.rst is---as it seems---the intended first summary page of the > documentation for any user of the kernel (the kernel's release notes > document). > > The section 'If something goes wrong' describes what to do when > encountering a bug and how to report it. The second sentence in that > section is especially historic and probably just discouraging for most > bug reporters ( ..."the second best thing is to mail them to me > (torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)"...). Ha, yeah, guess so :-D > Some random user (potentially > even unknown to the community) sending an email to Linus is most > probably the last best thing to do and is most likely just ignored, > right? I'd say it depends on the report and would guess Linus in quite a few cases will act on it if the report at least somewhat good -- or about something important, like a bisected regression. > Probably this section in README.rst needs a rewrite (summarizing > Thorsten's reporting-issues.rst, or just copying the summary from > there) and should then refer to reporting-issues.rst for more details. Well, any new summary sounds a bit like 'similar code paths for doing the same thing'. Sometimes that is necessary when coding, but often it's best avoided for known reasons. I think it's not that different for docs. Maybe just copying the "short guide" from the top of reporting-issues.rst might be the most elegant solution for README.rst while adding the link your mentioned (maybe while adding a comment to reporting-issues.rst saying something like 'if you update this section, update the copy over there, too'). But I'm not sure myself right now if that's really the best way forward; maybe a few modifications might be good here. Let's see what Jonathan says. Note, the section in README.rst you mentioned also contains a few aspects that reporting-issues.rst despite it's size doesn't cover. :-/ But some of that stuff looks outdated anyway. > Thorsten, do you have time to prepare a change to that document that > gives a short summary on how to report potential issues and > regressions? Otherwise, I will happily put that on my todo list and > probably can suggest some RFC patch in a week or two. Then go for it. Normally I'd be interested, but I'm short on time currently, as I'm working a lot on bugzilla integration for regzbot, have a vacation coming up, and need to prepare talks for two conferences (Kernel Summit and Open Source Summit). Ciao, Thorsten
