Comment by macNchz

10 months ago

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.

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macNchz

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raverbashing  10 months ago

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...

  • bonzini  10 months ago

    > Not using email patches

    GitHub issues with "load 450 hidden comments" on it? No threads, no comparisons between multiple submissions of the same patch, changes from rebasing impossible to separate from everything else? Having to drop anyway to the command line to merge a subset that has been reviewed? Encouraging squash merging makes it easier to work with long changes?

    Email is complex and bare bones, but GitHub/GitLab reviews are a dumpster fire for anything that isn't trivial.

  • mmooss  10 months ago

    Also see:

    https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250208204416.GL1130...

    • raverbashing  10 months ago

      That's a great post, and also the presentation linked there is very interesting and hints at some of the issues (though I disagree with some of the prescriptions there)

      Yes, the model is not scaling. Yes the current model is turning people away from contributing

      I don't think linux itself is risking extinction, but someday the last person in an IRC channel will turn the lights off and I wonder if then they will think about what could they have done better and why don't people care about finicky buildsystems with liberal use of M4. Probably not.

  • account42  10 months ago

    > There had probably been a lot of discussion in the background

    If that were the case then the patch would have a lot more CCs.