Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Jeff Garzik <jeff@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ingo Molnar wrote:
it would have been totally appropriate for me to just send a mail to lkml
with the proper subject line about the breakage. (I might even have
decided to stay completely silent about the issue and fix it for my own
build, letting you guys figure it out.)
Oh come on... You are smart enough to know to at least CC the driver
maintainer, the key POC who should be aware of breakage of their
driver. That is a standard courtesy.
is there any particular reason why you cut out the most relevant part of
my reply, which happens to answer all your questions AFAICS:
Instead i did a search of lkml (based on the function name in the
build error) and figured out where the pull request was on lkml:
Greg. I replied to that mail, he'll obviously know whom else to Cc
from that point on (if anyone). I really didnt want to (nor did i
need to) figure out whether this was some general driver level API
change that happen kernel-wide, or some SCSI specific change. I
simply replied to the pull request whose Cc: line seemed
well-populated to me already. I also took a look at the commit itself
and did a quick hack in a hurry to keep the tests rolling. It really
did not occur to me that i should have added anyone else to the Cc:
line, as linux-pci@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx was Cc:-ed already so i
assumed the interest was from that angle.
had you read this portion you'd have realized that i did not search for
any "owner" of the file, i simply searched for the person who introduced
the change, and the on-lkml mail where the change was introduced.
And therein lies the problem. The original submittor omitted relevant
maintainers, you followed that [incorrect] example, and the end result
was clear: an obviously wrong change.
Thus, the problem is precisely what you stated: you did not bother to
search for people who care about that file.
and that's all that should be needed, really. Believe me, i hit tons of
Hardly. What part of "this change requires knowledge of the hardware"
is difficult to understand?
And if you do not have that knowledge, why is it so trying to CC people
who actively maintain a driver, and have that knowledge?
It's simple common sense to -ask- or at least -notify- in such cases.
That the original submittor made the same mistake is no reason to repeat
the mistake.
bugs all across the kernel, often several bugs a day, and it's hard even
for me to figure out who "maintains" a file and when. (and in Linux
there's no "ownership" of files anyway) So as a general rule i go after
changes instead, and that's exactly what i did here too. I do
delta/regression QA - i.e. i watch for _changes_ that break the kernel
and hence the general 'owner' of a file is often irrelevant - it's the
maintainer who introduces a change who matters, and we do lots of
cross-maintain merges. Only if i do not manage to identify a change do i
try to figure out who maintains a file at that given moment. (But those
mails often go into black holes, they get bounced, subscriber-required
email lists, etc. etc.) It's also nontrivial to map the files to the
MAINTAINERS file, and it's also quite outdated in some portions. So the
MAINTAINERS file is the last resort i use.
That's a long list of excuses in an attempt to ignore the facts:
Fact 1: The driver you modified is actively maintained
Fact 2: The driver maintainer has respectfully indicated, through the
standard community mechanism, the useful points of contact.
Fact 3: The MAINTAINERS entry is correct and up-to-date.
Fact 4: Even if you wanted to ignore MAINTAINERS, 'git log' on the
relevant file could have told you who are useful parties to CC.
It's just common courtesy to CC a driver maintainer, ESPECIALLY when a
change requires knowledge of the driver/hardware in question.
so i'm still totally befuddled why you think that there was anything
particularly wrong or unhelpful about me replying to the specific pull
request that introduced a particular breakage into the kernel. Had i
mailed to lkml with a terse "kernel build broke" message with just an
URL to a config and the build breakage, you could rightfully have
complained that i should have done more to properly direct my bugreport.
But this breakage was about a PCI API change, the pull request had a PCI
mailing list Cc:-ed, why should i have thought that this needs the
attention of any other parties?
Because the change required knowledge not only of PCI, but of the
hardware in question. As your patch demonstrated.
And yes -- the original changes should have been CC'd to interested
parties as well. I'm still waiting to hear back from Alan or Bart
whether the ATA/IDE changes in that PCI pile actually work... the
original changeset even noted that relevant parties had not yet been
queried.
Jeff
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
