Subject: Re: linux-next: duplicate patches in the phy-next tree

From: "Theodore Ts'o" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2023 12:33:32 -0500

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 02:45:44PM +0100, Thierry Reding wrote:
> 
> This has been a recurring theme, so I'm trying to get a better
> understanding of what people expect here. Some maintainers want to see
> a whole series for a single feature (in this case it was Tegra234 USB
> support) even if it crosses multiple subsystems/trees. This has the
> advantage that patches can be arranged such that all dependencies are
> resolved. Other maintainers like things to be split up so that patches
> are easier to pick up.

Yeah, that's a problem I've seen work both ways.  For example, there
was the "Convert del_timer*() to timer_shutdown*()" series, which was
sent out both as a treewide patch as well as piecewise for each
subsystem.  The patches haven't been applied yet, and it's been on my
todo list to figure out (a) whether I should wait and for it to go in
via some other tree, and (b) whether it's safe to apply it standalone
for ext4, and that's what the patch author was intending.

Personally, I'm happy to do it both ways, especially for fairly
trivial treewide changes.  If it's complex enough that it's going to
cause merge conflict headaches, that would be different, but very
often, it's just 1 or 2 line changes in a very large number of
subsystems.

Cheers,

						- Ted