RE: Proposal: Linux Kernel Patch Management System

From: Dunlap, Randy (randy.dunlap@intel.com)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 11:17:55 EST


> From: Theodore Y. Ts'o [mailto:tytso@MIT.EDU]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2000 7:32 AM
>
>
> How can we simplify things? Part of the design of this new
> proposal was
> to change as little as possible from the existing setup
> (people's habits
> are hard to change), and yet to make my life and Linus's life much
> easier. In the long run, it will make your life easier, to the extent
> that having an up-to-date bug list is easier, and because then I won't
> have to continually pester people about whether certain bugs have been
> fixed.
>
> Right now, having to paw through diff files to see when Linus has
> applied a particular patch (add grumble about lack of a source code
> control system) is really not fun. Alan did it for a while,
> and burned
> out, and I can tell you, I can't really blame him --- it's a lot of
> work.
>
> Is it really that hard to annotate the patch with a bit of
> information,
> and then send it off to a different mailing address instead of sending
> it directly to Linus and the l-k list?
>
> What can we do to make things simpler on developers? Certainly this
> isn't going to work unless the developers use it, and that
> means we need
> to keep things as easy as possible for the patch submitters.

Ted,

I appreciate Alan and you doing the kernel Status/TODO lists,
but I think that you ought to simplify it for yourself at
least (not that this would help Linus) by having maintainers
do it instead of you do it.

I'm willing to do it for USB, but I'm not willing to duplicate
your work if you continue to do it. I don't expect you to
know/understand all of the filesystem or I/O subsystem or
VM or process issues and be able to track them without asking
lots of questions. (Maybe you do, but I don't think that should
be a requirement of the status-bot.)

You should roll up reports from maintainers for a summary
kernel status report.

~Randy

PS: This is probably too good to be true and would require
the assistance of lots of maintainers, but that's how it
should be done IMO.

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