There has been more than a few threads which went idle before the merge window and now people came back to them and started asking about next steps. We currently tell people to be patient and not to repost too often. Our "not too often", however, is still a few orders of magnitude faster than other subsystems. Or so I feel after hearing people talk about review rates at LPC. Clarify in the doc that if the discussion went idle for a week on netdev, 95% of the time there's no point waiting longer. Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@xxxxxxxxxx> --- v2: - rephrase the first paragraph v1: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20231118152232.787e9ea2@xxxxxxxxxx/ CC: corbet@xxxxxxx CC: workflows@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CC: linux-doc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --- Documentation/process/maintainer-netdev.rst | 20 +++++++++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/process/maintainer-netdev.rst b/Documentation/process/maintainer-netdev.rst index 7feacc20835e..84ee60fceef2 100644 --- a/Documentation/process/maintainer-netdev.rst +++ b/Documentation/process/maintainer-netdev.rst @@ -193,9 +193,23 @@ Review timelines Generally speaking, the patches get triaged quickly (in less than 48h). But be patient, if your patch is active in patchwork (i.e. it's listed on the project's patch list) the chances it was missed are close to zero. -Asking the maintainer for status updates on your -patch is a good way to ensure your patch is ignored or pushed to the -bottom of the priority list. + +The high volume of development on netdev makes reviewers move on +from discussions relatively quickly. New comments and replies +are very unlikely to arrive after a week of silence. If a patch +is no longer active in patchwork and the thread went idle for more +than a week - clarify the next steps and/or post the next version. + +For RFC postings specifically, if nobody responded in a week - reviewers +either missed the posting or have no strong opinions. If the code is ready, +repost as a PATCH. + +Emails saying just "ping" or "bump" are considered rude. If you can't figure +out the status of the patch from patchwork or where the discussion has +landed - describe your best guess and ask if it's correct. For example:: + + I don't understand what the next steps are. Person X seems to be unhappy + with A, should I do B and repost the patches? .. _Changes requested: -- 2.42.0
