RFC: DRM trivial tree

[Dave Airlie]

On 8 October 2015 at 01:15, Thierry Reding <thierry.reding at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Lately I've noticed that a bunch of trivial patches have been posted
> across all drivers. We've also encountered situations in the past where
> (relatively trivial) subsystem-wide changes have been made but it ended
> up being very difficult to get patches merged (often because they had
> inter-dependencies and nobody felt responsible for merging them). Often
> Dave has been the last resort for this kind of patches. A side-effect
> has been that it often takes a lot of time for such patches to get
> merged (if at all) and they usually don't end up in linux-next and
> therefore see little testing before they are applied.
>
> To remedy that situation I'd like to propose the addition of a tree to
> keep track of these kinds of patches. Note that the target here are
> trivial patches, such as coding style fixes, fixes for build warnings
> or errors, subsystem-wide API changes, etc. It also targets mostly the
> drivers that don't have a branch that feeds into linux-next. Patches
> against drivers that already feed into linux-next should go through the
> corresponding trees. One reasonable exception for this, in my opinion,
> are subsystem-wide changes, because applying them via different trees
> usually ends up being messy.
>
> I pushed a branch[0] with a set of patches that I've picked up from
> patchwork and which seemed to match the above criteria. I've also Cc'ed
> a bunch of people (mostly a subset of what get_maintainer.pl reported
> for the patches in the branch).
>
> Before going any further with this I'd like to get some feedback on the
> idea. Dave, do you think this is a good idea and would you be willing to
> give this a try?

I'm not going to object, I'm not sure trivial covers a lot of these
patches though.

I generally don't go nuts picking up the trivial patches on a weekly basis, as I
don't think they generally need that much attention, a number of the things
in your tree for example are things I've merged into -fixes instead, or I'm
waiting to see if driver maintainers pick them up themselves.

It would be nice if more driver maintainers had trees feeding into drm-next
or sent me drm-next pull requests no matter how small on a more regular basis
esp after -rc2/3.

So I probably wouldn't to a pull req from that tree, but it might be something
I'd cherry-pick from if I remember instead of using patchwork.

At least in theory I'm the last line of maintainer for the non-ARM drivers
(i.e. qxl, mgag200, etc), I don't really want to be last person in line for SoC
drivers as I'm not really knowledgeable enough, and for SoCs I'm pretty
much at the stage where only pull requests from someone who cares will generally
make me merge patches.

but hey lets give this a go and see if it helps, if you have the time!

Dave.