On Tuesday, April 07, 2015 09:28:03 AM Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 02:31:23PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > > > > > As per the other branch of this tree; an emphatic NO to that. The > > > trivial tree is not a backdoor to bypass maintainers. Actual code > > > changes do not get to go through any tree but the maintainer tree unless > > > explicitly ACKed. > > > > Well, practically speaking, that would make changes like the recent > > clockevents_notify() removal very difficult to carry out. Also there is > > some natural cross-talk between certain subsystems. > > I would not call the clockevents_notify() series "trivial". More advanced > clean ups that are system wide, would be different, because you are changing > the way the code works. The maintainers must be Cc'd, but sometimes I find > those changes are very hard to get acks from everyone. But again, the change > is a non trivial clean up and has other reasons for going in than just to > make the code look nice. > > > > > Different matter is the real value of tree-wide cleanup changes. If code is > > old enough it often is better to leave it alone, even though it may be doing > > things that we don't usually do nowadays. > > Or maybe it's a good time to rewrite that code such that everyone can > understand > it today ;-) > > > > > Or things that new patches are not supposed to do, for that matter, so > > I generally don't like the "checkpatch.pl error fix" changes in the old > > code. > > > > I totally agree with that. But for non trivial clean ups, old code should be > updated too.
Well, there still is some risk of introducing real bugs this way (I *have* seen "trivial cleanups" that broke things) and is it really worth it? Besides, old code is somewhat like an ancient building. Yes, it needs to be kept in a good shape, but you won't replace bricks in it just because they are old, will you? Rafael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
