Subject: Re: [PATCH batadv 0/8] batman-adv: follow up fixes

From: Sven Eckelmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 May 2026 09:20:03 +0200

On Tuesday, 5 May 2026 07:21:13 CEST Matthieu Baerts wrote:
[...]
> >>> Are you CCing netdev to get this reviewed by Sashiko?
> >>> Please don't..
> >>> We delegate code to sub-sub-systems to lower the patch volume :(
> >>>
> >>
> >> Because of `b4 prep --auto-to-cc`. Will now manually remove you.
> >
> > To speed up the discussion: @Konstantin, is there a way in b4 to say "stop at
> > the sub-sub-systems" when doing `b4 prep --auto-to-cc`? I am just trying to get the
> > `b4` workflow somehow working with the netdev requirements.
> 
> Maybe a new option could be added, but that seems difficult to guess
> where to stop, and to which subsystems to apply this.
> 
> Can you not simply omit using `b4 prep --auto-to-cc` when working
> with "internal" patches?

Yes, no, maybe :)
I will for the moment ignore the .b4-config part and talk about it at the end 
of the mail.

b4 is trying to (afaik) to have a good common work flow for kernel related 
projects (and more). Independent of my role (if I am the maintainer or just 
another contributor), it will nag before a send: "Hey, please run 
--auto-to-cc, --check, --check-deps before you submit this patch(set) - you 
know how embarrassing it is when you notice some obvious problem 2 seconds 
after the SMTP server accepted your mail."

And I agree with this and also try to convince people to try b4 because I 
think it is really helpful. Or at least ask them to use
`./scripts/get_maintainer.pl` and NOT send patches with the prefix "net" or 
"net-next" when it actually targets our tree. But as it turns out, these 
recommendation seem to have been wrong and I am sorry about this.

And I know, b4 is a good tool but adding a bazillion options just for every 
special case doesn't make a lot of sense and might make it a worse tool. I was 
therefore more thinking about `scripts/get_maintainer.pl`  (see `b4.send-auto-
cc-cmd`) which also called by b4 with various options to avoid adding too many 
people.

I don't say that any of these tools need to change. I am guessing more that I 
have to adjust something (MAINTAINERS, ...) to avoid that people are sending 
batman-adv sub-sub-system patches directly to netdev. I am just not aware of 
what this should be. But it sounds to me like there is at least a need for it 
(from the netdev maintainers perspective).

> On my side, that's what I'm doing. I added a .b4-config file with this
> content, not to have to specify --set-prefix nor --to:

Regarding the .b4-config - yes, this is helpful and I should add it to 
batctl.git. I was more thinking about the normal contributor to 
net/batman-adv/. Regardless of this person taking as base net/net-next.git or 
our repo.

The fixes from Ren Wei (and associates) and some other people were sent with 
"net" in the prefix, were Cc'ing netdev and didn't seem to use our tree as 
base. This is of course not correct and they should have targeted our tree 
instead. I didn't complain because the fix was otherwise extremely helpful and 
I though that there was no harm done. As it looks now, I should have and I am 
sorry for not communicating this.

And I am at the moment not sure how to fix this without overloading 
contributers with "when you are contributing to some sub-subsystem of netdev 
..., but when you are contributing to ext4, other rules apply .... don't 
forget about i2c rules for patch submission, ...".

But maybe I am just ignorant and this is already quite simple (and there are 
no special "netdev" rules) - I am just not aware of it. In this case, please 
point me in the right direction, just to avoid reproducing wrong 
recommendations to other people.

Regards,
	Sven