[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] stable kernel stuff and grumpy maintainers

Guenter Roeck linux at roeck-us.net
Tue Jun 19 16:00:36 UTC 2012


On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 11:06:34AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-06-19 at 10:46 -0400, Ted Ts'o wrote:
> 
> > Part of the problem is that for some of the contributors, English
> > isn't their first language.  I've very often had to rewrite the change
> > log for that reason; in some cases, it was so mangled that even though
> > it was a paragraph full of text, I couldn't parse it at all, and I had
> > to send back a "huh?  Is this what you meant?" message.
> 
> There has been many times that I have had issues with language and had
> to fully rewrite change logs myself. That, I believe is the maintainer's
> responsibility, and this is not what I'm really talking about. Although,
> a maintainer needs to push back and get a better change log, even if
> they need to be the one to rewrite it.
> 
> Note, usually I don't need to ask "is this what you meant" because as
> the expert in the code being submitted to me, I can deduce from the
> patch itself what is going on. This is how I determine if I am willing
> to take the patch or not. If I know the person submitting the patch has
> issues with the language, I look at the patch, it becomes obvious what
> the change is for, and then I rewrite the change log to explain in
> detail what the patch was about. So far no one has complained about me
> doing this. I do not, however, modify the patch itself, except for very
> small changes, and if I do that, I add to the change log explaining the
> change I made, no matter how little the change was.
> 
Same here (not that my English is perfect ;).

Guenter


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