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.
I don’t follow the Linux kernel development process closely, but on most projects—open source or proprietary—that I’ve been involved in, dropping a big diff without having proposed or discussed anything about it beforehand would have been fairly unwelcome, even if it’s something that would be infeasible to break down smaller. I’d also argue that even quite substantial changes can be made with incremental patches, if you choose to do so.
There had probably been a lot of discussion in the background
The "every change can be a small patch, can be split in such" is part now of the Linux folklore IMHO. As in, a belief that people kinda heard about but nobody has concrete proof
Also do you know what would make it much easier to review long changes? Not using email patches
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
Indeed, and that's exactly what the Rust for Linux guys are doing. They have Binder, multiple changes with various degrees of dependency on newer compilers, support for different kinds of drivers, and they are extracting them and sending them to Linux in small bits.
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.
I don’t follow the Linux kernel development process closely, but on most projects—open source or proprietary—that I’ve been involved in, dropping a big diff without having proposed or discussed anything about it beforehand would have been fairly unwelcome, even if it’s something that would be infeasible to break down smaller. I’d also argue that even quite substantial changes can be made with incremental patches, if you choose to do so.
There had probably been a lot of discussion in the background
The "every change can be a small patch, can be split in such" is part now of the Linux folklore IMHO. As in, a belief that people kinda heard about but nobody has concrete proof
Also do you know what would make it much easier to review long changes? Not using email patches
But I'm glad there's an good answer on "how to do it" in the thread https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/Z6bdCrgGEq8Txd-s@home...
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Then you have to discuss first, before throwing tousands of lines of code at somebody.
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
Indeed, and that's exactly what the Rust for Linux guys are doing. They have Binder, multiple changes with various degrees of dependency on newer compilers, support for different kinds of drivers, and they are extracting them and sending them to Linux in small bits.