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Why is it shameful? Someone considered this an improvement, went through the process of creating >1000 patches and submitted them for review. That the patches were rejected categorically and someone presumably spent consideralbe development time on them is also not bad, because the likelihood of a good response to a question "what if I replaced .. with .." is low and seeing the huge patchset also drives home the amount of magic numbers one might replace.

It's just how software is developed where code is reviewed before inclusion and not committed-by-default and backed out later. And there's no Intel pre-mailing patch review group that has to vet kernel patches before a dev is allowed to send them out, ignoring NDA'ed things, of course.

There is no ill will here, and Intel has more unseasoned Linux developers now, so it's normal for seemingly naive patches to appear.

We need more developers who try, fail, try again, and that requires less shaming and more encouragement.



Blasting over 1200 emails to a mailing list with no heads-up appears quite tone-deaf, to put it mildly even if you presume good intentions.

Edit: The impact could be shown in a single email with a diffstat, for example. Complaining about a lack of feedback for such a thing sounds more like complaining about failing to draw others in to a bikeshedding competition.


> The impact could be shown in a single email with a diffstat, for example.

True, and I agree, but not the way stuff is usually done on LKML, thus probably not considered.

In this special case of a huge number of patches it might have been a good idea to present an RFC diffstat first, yes. Actually, I wish github had a .diffstat extension for pull requests, because often that's the first thing I care about before I know if I want to delve into a random big patch.


Blasting over 1200 emails to a mailing list with no heads-up appears quite tone-deaf

Compared to the bits and pieces of LKML I occasionally see, blasting 1200 emails is downright polite.


Or a initial email going "heads up, big patch set coming through!", with the patch set as replies to that one.


That's usually what happens with a git formatted patchset that has you draft a patch-0 (aka introduction of the series) email.


Fair point, though LKML is very high volume, so not as much of a big deal as one might think.


>That the patches were rejected categorically and someone presumably spent consideralbe development time on them

These were obviously generated programattically. I refuse to believe otherwise.




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