Getting whole-tree patches reviewed and merged (was: Integrating QOM into QAPI)

[Markus Armbruster]

Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, 21 Jan 2020 at 15:11, Marc-André Lureau
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> There are plenty of refactoring to do. The problem when touching the
>> whole code-base, imho, is review time. It may take a couple of
>> hours/days to come up with a cocci/spatch, and make various patches
>> here and there. But it takes often weeks and a lot of constant push to
>> various folks to get all the reviews (as seens by the qdev prop-ptr
>> series earlier for example). How can we better address whole code-base
>> changes?
>
> It depends. If it's literally just a cocci/spatch mechanical
> transformation, I think we should be OK with reviewing that
> transform and then applying it; we don't need to get acks
> from every submaintainer for that kind of thing.

I go one step further: I prefer mechanical changes committed together,
not torn apart and routed through N+1 trees, where N is the number of
active maintainers picking patches from the series, and 1 is the
maintainer taking pity of the inevitable leftovers.

Tearing a patch series apart may be in order when it's invasive enough
to risk many conflicts.  The subsystem maintainer may need tighter
control over merging order then, and routing picked patches through his
own tree may be the practical way to get it.

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