RFC: DRM trivial tree

[Thierry Reding]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2015 at 09:46:50AM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 08, 2015 at 09:04:06AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > 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!
> 
> I think this tree could be useful as a welcoming ground for new folks who
> send in small fixes as their first patch. I think we have a few of those
> nowadays (besides the usual tree-wide style police), and I think making
> sure that their patches get an "ack, merged it to $branch" quickly would
> help a lot in motivating them to dig in more. So not about patches getting
> lost, but getting a quick thanks out there. I'm doing that for the core
> with drm-misc, but there's definitely a gap with armsoc infrastructure and
> random drivers.
> 
> So maybe don't call it drm-trivial (since "hey your patch here is trivial"
> doesn't sound that awesome) but drm-misc-drivers.

I'm afraid that this is going to encourage people to not properly
maintain their drivers. The reason why I wanted to call it trivial was
because the requirement would have to be that the patches should be
small. I lack the knowledge about most SoC drivers to properly review
patches that go beyond minor things like cleanup.

That said, I guess it would be okay to pick up more complex patches if
they had an Acked-by or Reviewed-by from a maintainer. Then again, if
they already find the time to review patches it probably wouldn't be a
lot more effort to apply them to their own tree.

But that's all really speculation, so perhaps it'd be best to just try
it out and see how it goes. If it isn't useful we can always drop it
again.

Thierry
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