On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 10:26:27 -0700, Joe Perches said: > And the generic individual maintainer apply rate for > each specific patch is always less than 50%. > > For instance the patches that converted the comma uses > in if/do/while statements to use braces and semicolons > from a month ago: > 29 patches, 13 applied. To be fair, it's *always* been hard to get pure style patches applied, because they usually hit one of two types of code, with different results: Some of them hit code that's been stable for a long time - and those patches don't get applied because of the (admittedly small) risk that a "style" patch may actually break something - yes, that *does* happen often enough to worry a risk-adverse subtree maintainer. Some of them hit code that's actively being worked on - and those patches don't get applied because they can cause merge conflicts. This is a hard problem to fix, because it's difficult to say that either of those viewpoints is *totally* wrong. At best, you can make the case that some maintainers are a tad over-zealous on their attitude. And since its *hard* to find good maintainers, it's not possible to fix the problem by just putting somebody else in charge of a subtree. It's theoretically possible to bypass a problematic maintainer by sending the patch to the person one level up, or directly to Linus - but although that usually works if you have an urgent patch and the maintainer is on vacation or stubborn or whatever, that's got essentially zero chance of succeeding for a mere style patch. Unfortunately, although I understand the problem, I don't have a solution. It's easy to tactfully say "this code is wrong, and here is the fix". It's a lot harder to find a tactful way to say "This person is wrong and should do it this way", because code doesn't fight back when you offer constructive criticism....
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