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Subject: Re: [PATCH] pinctrl: pxa: pxa2xx: Remove 'pxa2xx_pinctrl_exit()'
 which is unused and broken
From:   Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
To:     Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@inria.fr>
Cc:     Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>,
        Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
        Christophe JAILLET <christophe.jaillet@wanadoo.fr>,
        Robert Jarzmik <robert.jarzmik@free.fr>,
        Daniel Mack <daniel@zonque.org>,
        Haojian Zhuang <haojian.zhuang@gmail.com>,
        Linux ARM <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>,
        "open list:GPIO SUBSYSTEM" <linux-gpio@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org
Date:   Thu, 04 Jun 2020 04:08:32 -0700
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On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 12:33 +0200, Julia Lawall wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 4 Jun 2020, Joe Perches wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 11:52 +0200, Julia Lawall wrote:
> > > Should Fixes also be used when the change will make it hard to port other
> > > fixes over it?
> > 
> > If it's a logic defect or regression that's being fixed,
> > shouldn't the logic defect or regression be fixed as
> > reasonably soon as possible?
> 
> Sure, but I recall seeing some patches that mentioned that the problem had
> existed since the beginning of git.  Of course, it should be rare.

git history goes back 15 years already.
There are scant few bugs that old.

There is a tree with even older history that Rob Landley
still has here: https://landley.net/kdocs/fullhist/

It does make git blame research a bit easier for those
rare and extremely old defects.

> > The nature of the fix should ideally be optimal for
> > backporting, but I believe that should not stop any
> > consideration for the standalone fix itself.
> 
> I'm not sure to follow this.

I think it comes down to defects in current need to be
fixed.  Describing
the base commit that is being fixed
is useful for backporting.

I believe it's not reasonable to ask the author of a
fix to research how it could or should be backported.

> Sometimes non-bug fixes that block
> backporting a bug fix have to be backported as well.  So the fixes would
> again highlight the range of versions affected by the issue.

Sure, but the non-bug fixes that may also need backporting
to enable easy backports of the actual fix should not be
described in the Fixes: <commit> as those are  generally
easily researched from a command like:

$ git log <commit>.. <files in fix>

by whoever needs to backport.