On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 12:04:51PM +0100, Lee Jones wrote:
On Wed, 08 May 2013, Mark Brown wrote:
Ugh, please don't do stuff like this - you're posting an individual revision of a patch buried in the middle of a thread. This just makes things hard to follow and error prone. Repost the patch series
It's so much more convenient to do it this way. Re-sending entire patch-sets for small fixups is clumsy and annoying at best. Creating even more prone to error.
Then consider what happens as soon as you get more than one update to the patch, or there's any meaningful discussion on the patches - picking out which of many versions in bifurcating threads. You shouldn't even assume that followups to the patches are being read, for example if it's clear that there's revision required and it's all device specific discussion rather than framework stuff I'll often just stop reading the thread and wait for the respost.
much more churn than is actually required. Sending patches again signally i.e. not as a reply to the original [PATCH x/x], would be
Of course, yes - that's a bad idea.
Surely most people have their mail setup as threaded? Then the time-line and subsequent patch versions are very easy to follow aren't they? I get a nice trace like this:
<date> Fabio Baltieri ( 0) ├>[PATCH 2/6] ASoC: ux500: <snip> <date> To Fabio Baltieri ( 0) │└> <date> Fabio Baltieri ( 0) │ └>[PATCH v2 2/6] ASoC: <snip>
... or even better would be to reply to the original one, then subsequent versions won't be "buried in the thread" per say:
<date> Fabio Baltieri ( 0) ├>[PATCH 2/6] ASoC: ux500: <snip> <date> Fabio Baltieri ( 0) │ └>[PATCH v2 2/6] ASoC: <snip> <date> To Fabio Baltieri ( 0) │->
This doesn't work nearly so well once you start getting meaningful discussion, multiple branches on the thread and indentation can make it hard to spot where the latest patch is and it's still more effort to find the latest version.
or wait until what can be applied is applied then repost.
Taking patches out-of-order, or 'willy-nilly', is asking for trouble.
We've been through this repeatedly. If your early patches won't work without the later patches then you need to improve your early patches so they stand alone. Asking people to re-review an enormous patch series because of a change at the end isn't helpful