linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL] flexible-array member conversion patches for 5.8-rc2

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Message-ID: <20200616021126.GK10051@embeddedor>
Date:   Mon, 15 Jun 2020 21:11:26 -0500
From:   "Gustavo A. R. Silva" <gustavoars@...nel.org>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] flexible-array member conversion patches for 5.8-rc2

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 04:07:28PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 1:34 PM Gustavo A. R. Silva
> <gustavoars@...nel.org> wrote:
> >
> > flexible-array member conversion patches for 5.8-rc2
> 
> Gaah. I merged this, and even spent some time trying to make the merge
> message look better, and then when I started looking at the end
> result, I ended up unpulling it.
> 
> It's all been recently rebased, which I might be willing to ignore for
> something like this, but all these one-liner patches then come with a
> boiler-plate commit message that is something like 50 lines long and
> is actively misleading as it talks about "this tree-wide patch" and
> just repeats the generic issues that were presented (better) in the
> merge message anyway.
> 
> The individual commit messages literally add nothing specific to that
> commit AT ALL except for the very first line, which is also
> boiler-plate but at least mentions the subsystem.
> 
> End result: when I do "git log" after having merged this, the result
> is basically two *thousand* lines of repeated noise.
> 
> Some repetition is fine. But 2000 lines of repeated boiler-plate makes
> me go "that's actively detrimental to any use of 'git log'" and I
> undid my pull.
> 

Yep, you're right. We made the mistake of not having something to point
people to, from the beginning; which we are trying to fix by adding the
following documentation to deprecated.rst:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200608213711.GA22271@embeddedor/

That's the reason why the log for these sorts of patches ended up being
so repetitive: as a way to compensate for not having proper documentation
in place from the beginning.

And yes, it was my mistake not to remove part of the log from the changelog
text when I turned the treewide patch into separate per-subsystem patches
--for they to be properly tested by the 0-day CI Kernel Test Service.

I will modify the changelog text of the separate patches and send you the
pull-request once again.

BTW, the commit message is the exact same text we are planning to add to
the deprecated.rst file, which will be used for both zero-length and
one-element array conversions. It might be better to to remove the part
for the one-element arrays, in this case.

Thanks
--
Gustavo