Fifth in a long series of complaints... See part 1 and part 2 and part 3 and part4 for previous atrocities.

Heck, It's not like I haven't said all of this before, but it sure seems like no one learns from the past, or reads the documentation that we write for how to actually submit a patch for the kernel. Linux has one of the best documented procedures for how to do this, it's not like it's a secret or something...

Anyway, here's a list of patches that people have sent me in this week alone that have caused me major problems:

• patch was never even build tested, and of course, it breaks when you do build it.
• patch does build, but it was never tested because the patch does the opposite of what the submitter wanted to do.
• patch sent with no authorship
• patch sent with no signed-off-by line
• patch sent with no description of what the patch did
• patch sent with a description, yet it was not the description of the patch itself
• patch sent with a description that the patch only did one thing, yet the patch did 4 different things
• patch sent with a description that made no sense at all
• patch sent in a series of 13 patches, all with the same exact subject, and no description of what the patch did
• a one line patch that if applied, would instantly break the build
• patch that asked for reviews, yet gets angry when you ask why something was done a certain way
• patch that asked for reviews, and when asked, can't explain why code was done a certain way, blaming a non-existent person for that portion
• patch that said it fixed a bug, yet added a new feature without fixing the original bug
• patch for cleaning up coding style issues, yet adds different coding issues
• patches asked for review, yet had obviously never been even run through our automatic "test this patch for sanity" tools.

Yeah, it's been a fun week...

And if anyone ever wonders why code reviewers are grumpy, just look at the above list and understand.

posted Thu, 10 Feb 2011 in [/linux]