Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756550AbdLTT6b (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Dec 2017 14:58:31 -0500 Received: from bombadil.infradead.org ([65.50.211.133]:39305 "EHLO bombadil.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755557AbdLTT63 (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Dec 2017 14:58:29 -0500 Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] ps3: Improve a size determination in five functions To: SF Markus Elfring , linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org, Benjamin Herrenschmidt , Michael Ellerman , Paul Mackerras Cc: LKML , kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org References: <9b6464bc-a408-de2a-1b54-cb7794b92506@users.sourceforge.net> <7aed1208-aa55-edb6-54be-f47fb1498bfd@users.sourceforge.net> From: Geoff Levand Message-ID: Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2017 11:58:27 -0800 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <7aed1208-aa55-edb6-54be-f47fb1498bfd@users.sourceforge.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1622 Lines: 39 Hi, On 12/16/2017 05:54 AM, SF Markus Elfring wrote: > From: Markus Elfring > Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2017 14:21:04 +0100 > > Replace the specification of data structures by variable references > as the parameter for the operator "sizeof" to make the corresponding size > determination a bit safer according to the Linux coding style convention. After some thought, I've decided to reject this patch and others like it because I feel it will make long term maintenance of the PS3 code more difficult. Some observations: o Your patch fixes no bug nor replaces any depreciated feature. o There will be no functional change; the generated binary will be nearly identical. o The PS3 kernel support is now over 10 years old. o I need to continue support for a few old kernel versions, specifically linux-3.15 and linux-2.6.30. That includes keeping them working with new toolchain versions. I need to back port fixes to these old kernels. o When problems arise I sometimes need to use git bisect back to old kernel versions. When I do the bisect I often have fixes and local debug patches that I apply to the bisected tree before building. o Source code changes between versions causes patch conflicts that need to be manually resolved. This can be error prone and very time consuming on a long bisect session. My decision to reject this patch and others like it is in attempt to minimize the code maintenance effort. If you have patches that fix bugs, upgrade depreciated features, or generally improve functionality please submit them for review. -Geoff