Philipp Muhoray <philipp.muhoray@gmail.com> writes:
Not that I have any say in this, but I feel like a ban should rather be justified by someone's behavior instead of incorrect patches.
It's not a ban, it's a protective filter. Maintainers and reviewers are limited resources. We should not waste them.
I guess most of us have send awful patches at some point, the question though is how we dealt with it. I'm not saying the ban should be lifted, I'm just saying we should communicate the right arguments for his ban (instead of blaming him for commit messages he didn't even write).
If you look at what actually happened, you'll see a very good example of why the filter is still required: The original patch was yet another completely pointless fixme-comment deletion, without any real explanation whatsoever in the commit message. And it wasn't even properly formatted with a subsystem prefixed subject etc. So the maintainer had to spend time trying to fix up the commit message and figuring out why it was OK to delete those fixme comments. As has been pointed out here, that explanation could still be incomplete. I guess the maintainer didn't want to spend hours looking at something as pointless as this. The problem is that he didn't realize that this patch was a waste of time before spending time on it at all. Which is exactly why the maintainers should be protected against having to look at stuff like this, if possible. And in this case it *is*. There are exactly zero examples of valuable patches from that author. If you look at the history of accepted patches, you will find that in each and every case there is some reviewer or maintainer doing the *real* work - figuring out that the patch is OK and explaining why. And the result is still patches without any real value. They don't solve any problem for anyone. They are the result of stupid and mindless grepping for a specific word in comments. Yes, we have all wasted time for maintainers and reviewers by sending them stuff we shouldn't have. That's part of the game. The problem in this case is the massive distribution over an insane number of subsystems in combination with the inability to learn anything at all. Wasting one maintainer's time once is excusable. Wasting hundreds of maintainer's time over and over again is absolutely not. It's potentionally destructive to the whole project if it is allowed to continue. This very thread is yet another example of the contentless noise from this source, and I hate myself for having wasted your time having to read this. Sorry about that. But I write it in the hope that you will understand that the filtering is *not* about punishing anyone. It is about protecting or most valuable resources. And if anyone still wonders: Requests for "ban removal" has no value to the community, and are therefore the exact opposite of what's required to have the filter removed. Bjørn