Hi everyone,
Lately I've noticed that a bunch of trivial patches have been posted across all drivers. We've also encountered situations in the past where (relatively trivial) subsystem-wide changes have been made but it ended up being very difficult to get patches merged (often because they had inter-dependencies and nobody felt responsible for merging them). Often Dave has been the last resort for this kind of patches. A side-effect has been that it often takes a lot of time for such patches to get merged (if at all) and they usually don't end up in linux-next and therefore see little testing before they are applied.
To remedy that situation I'd like to propose the addition of a tree to keep track of these kinds of patches. Note that the target here are trivial patches, such as coding style fixes, fixes for build warnings or errors, subsystem-wide API changes, etc. It also targets mostly the drivers that don't have a branch that feeds into linux-next. Patches against drivers that already feed into linux-next should go through the corresponding trees. One reasonable exception for this, in my opinion, are subsystem-wide changes, because applying them via different trees usually ends up being messy.
I pushed a branch[0] with a set of patches that I've picked up from patchwork and which seemed to match the above criteria. I've also Cc'ed a bunch of people (mostly a subset of what get_maintainer.pl reported for the patches in the branch).
Before going any further with this I'd like to get some feedback on the idea. Dave, do you think this is a good idea and would you be willing to give this a try?
Again, I'm not volunteering to be a maintainer for all of the smaller drivers. The goal here is to make it easier to get cleanup patches into linux-next, or provide a place where subsystem-wide changes can be coordinated. Driver maintainers should still review the patches and in many cases I'd want to wait for Acked-by or Reviewed-by tags before taking any patches into the trivial tree. Also, while I'll try to monitor the list as best I can, it will inevitably happen that I'll miss patches. When that happens, feel free to Cc me if you think the patches match the above criteria.
For a while now it's also been difficult to find maintainers for drivers so I'd like to see more entries being added to MAINTAINERS to help identify the people that need to be involved and hopefully make this process easier.
Thierry
[0]: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/tegra/linux/log/?h=drm/trivial/for-next