Hi all, I've sent a series of 19 patches (co-developed by Pavel Skripkin). Now it is v7 and we hope it is the latest revision. :) Few days ago, when it was still at v5, Dan Carpenter reviewed the whole series and asked us to remove "irrelevant" information from the commit message of 15/19: [1] "This relates to the discussion we had about reviewing patches one at a time in the order they arrive. Every patch should be self contained. It should not refer to the past except in the case of explaining the Fixes tag and it should not refer to the future except in the case where it needs to excuse adding unused infrastructure. Reviewing is stateless. We don't want to know about your plans.". I decided that he was right and so I removed that extra information (they were about plans to remove the function that I'm cleaning up in the next patch 18/19. The clean-ups were somewhat necessary because part of the code of the old function is re-used in new functions introduced in 17/19 and 18/19 and it is then deleted forever, with a strange side effect that at least one reviewer (David Laight) thought that we were renaming variables and that renamings should go to separate patches. However they were _not_ renamings (as I explain above). I thought that preventive real renaming of the variables that I reuse in the next patches within _new_ functions would have helped other developers to review the patches 16-19/19 while avoiding that at a quick read they could appear as renaming. Actually then David wrote that now the patches are more easily readable. In the meantime, Dan C. granted his "Reviewed-by" tag to the first 14 patches of 19. All patches from 2/19 to 12/19 have the following phrase in the commit messages: "This patch is in preparation for the _io_ops structure removal.". [2] My question is: why "This patch is preparation for _io_ops [future] structure removal." is good while "Eventually this function will be deleted but some of the code will be reused later." is not. I'm not really interested in this specific case. I'd like to have general guidelines that I can understand and use for my future patches. Sorry for this long email, I wasn't able to make it shorter :( Thanks in advance to whoever has more experience than I have and wants to make this topic clearer to me. Fabio [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210915135301.GF2088@kadam/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210915124149.27543-3-fmdefrancesco@xxxxxxxxx/ _______________________________________________ Kernelnewbies mailing list Kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
