On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 10:19:38AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
On 20 October 2015 at 10:14, Mark Brown broonie@kernel.org wrote:
Please don't send content free pings and please allow a reasonable time for review. People get busy, go on holiday, attend conferences and so on so unless there is some reason for urgency (like critical bug fixes) please allow at least a couple of weeks for review. Sending content free pings just adds to the mail volume (if they are seen at all) and if something has gone wrong you'll have to resend the patches anyway.
To be honest, maintainers also forget, get busy doing other things, get diverted down rabbit holes, get tasked to do something else. We also don't know when maintainers are at conferences, or on holidays.
This is why I'm saying leave a reasonable amount of time, for relatively short delays on non-critical stuff the most likely explanation is that something like the above has happened and there is no problem.
I don't think repinging patches after 11 days is that unreasonable if you've gotten replies quicker than that previously.
It's a waste of time, if it's just a delay then at best what's going to happen is that the mail is going to get threaded in with the original posting and make handling the series take longer when it does get looked at (something made worse by the tendency for content free pings to do things like not bother trimming context or top post). If things have been dropped then all it does is require that the maintainer ask that the patch be resent again which just makes things take even longer. Either way a content free ping, especially a rapid one, is at best slowing things down.
When people chase me to review their patches ahead of other people's without some reason for it my standard response is to defer reviewing those changes, I don't want to create the impression that this is a good way for people to get their work prioritised.
If people are taking the fact that sometimes responses come faster as a sign that content free pings are a good idea then I begin to see why some maintainers are just generally unresponsive. :(
I'd prefer a content free ping, rather than another round of the patches with two spelling mistakes fixed etc.
It's very easy to just discard old serieses and never even look at them, we have to do that all the time anyway when other people help out with review and identify issues.