Comment by bonzini
10 months ago
I don't know, dropping 17000 lines of code is probably not the best way to solicit technical discussions
(https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240826103728.3378-1-greg@enje... is the patch set in question)
10 months ago
I don't know, dropping 17000 lines of code is probably not the best way to solicit technical discussions
(https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240826103728.3378-1-greg@enje... is the patch set in question)
That's version 4. Here's version 2, which looks like the first patch submission:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/20230204050954...
7000 is not a lot better.
Okay, but how long is reasonable to take to tell someone that their patch is too big to be reviewed?
> We were meticulous in our submissions to avoid wasting maintainers time. We even waited two months without hearing a word before we sent an inquiry as to the status of one of the submissions. We were told, rather curtly, that anything we sent would likely be ignored if we ever inquired about them.
It's reasonable to ask that people make smaller-sized patches to get reviewed, and it's reasonable to have to rule out some things due to not having the bandwidth for it compared to other priorities, but it's pretty ridiculous to expect people to know that those are the reason their code isn't getting reviewed if they're not allowed to inquire once after two months of radio silence.
Not everything can be broken down into 5 line patches. Some of the bigger features need bigger code. You can look at the impact radius and see if the patch is behind a feature flag to make a decision. In this case, it seems like it is elective and does not have any changes beyond what is self-contained.
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Totally. And also: the discussion must take place FIRST!
One of the first habits I learned at BigCo was to have a sense of the DAG in any work over 400 lines, so I could make patches arbitrarily large or small. Because whichever I chose, someone would complain eventually
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17KLoC? Maybe he should consider they’re probably still reviewing it through bloody eyes. But seriously I wouldn’t want to review that much code.
I'd get mildly angry if someone sent a giant patch without having discussed with me first. (Not working with any kernel things) But a quicker "no, don't have time, probably never will" response would have been nice I guess?
no feedback whatsoever for 2 months - just because it was 17k lines - and you are blindly defending it? if you don't know what you are posting & talking about, then maybe you shouldn't.
if someone is willing to put in the efforts to submit such a huge patch, how about just show them a little bit respect, I mean the minimum amount of respect, for such efforts and send them a one line reply asking them to break the patch into smaller ones.
surely that won't take more than 45 seconds. still too hard to get the point?
> if you don't know what you are posting & talking about, then maybe you shouldn't
I hate to appeal to authority, but I have been working with large cathedral-style open source projects (mostly three: GCC, QEMU, Linux itself) for about 20 years at this time and have been a maintainer for a Linux subsystem for 12. So I do know what I am posting and talking about.
The very fact that I had never learned about this subsystem from LWN, Linux Plumbers Conference, Linux Security Summit etc. means that the problem is not technical and is not with the maintainers not replying it.
A previous submission (7000 lines) did have some replies from the maintainers. Apparently instead of simplifying the submission it ballooned into something 150% larger. At some point I am not sure what the maintainers could do except ignoring it.
> At some point I am not sure what the maintainers could do except ignoring it.
Ignoring people is a childs approach to communication. If there is a problem, its your responsibility to communicate it. If you have communicated the issue and the other party is refusing to hear it, that is a different issue, but it is your responsibility to communicate.
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Surely if there were insufficient established context for a reviewer to easily follow a large patch the correct response would be a swift rejection with a request that such context be established prior to submitting again.
It sounds like there was willingness to meet any requirements, but submitters end up in a position of not knowing what the requirements are and if they have met them or not.
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