On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 15:47:28 -0400 Willem de Bruijn wrote: > On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 12:02 PM Xie He <xie.he.0...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 8:18 AM Xie He <xie.he.0...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Especially without that, I'm not sure this and the follow-on patch add > > > > much value. Minor code cleanups complicate backports of fixes. > > > > > > To me this is necessary, because I feel hard to do any development on > > > un-cleaned-up code. I really don't know how to add my code without > > > these clean-ups, and even if I managed to do that, I would not be > > > happy with my code. > > That is the reality of working in this space, I think. I have > frequently restructured code, fixed a bug and then worked backwards to > create a *minimal* bugfix that applies to the current code as well as > older stable branches. > > Obviously this is more of a concern for stable fixes than for new > code. But we have to keep in mind that every code churn will make > future bug fixes harder to roll out to users. That is not to say that > churn should be avoided, just that we need to balance a change's > benefit against this cost. > > > And always keeping the user interface and even the code unchanged > > contradicts my motivation of contributing to the Linux kernel. All my > > contributions are motivated by the hope to clean things up. I'm not an > > actual user of any of the code I contribute. If we adhere to the > > philosophy of not doing any clean-ups, my contributions would be > > meaningless. > > There are cleanups and cleanups. Dead code removal and deduplication > of open coded logic, for instance, are very valuable. As is, for > instance, your work in making sense of hard_header_len.
Or removing the buggy uses of IFF_TX_SKB_SHARING, for that matter (which at this point I agree we should just remove from ether_setup, and let people who care re-enable it). > Returning code in branches vs an error jump label seems more of a > personal preference, and to me does not pass the benefit/cost threshold. I must agree.