Patch Question

[Perry Hooker]

Thanks for the advice, Tobin - I appreciate the reply.

In this case, I've already followed your advice - I studied the
reviewer's comments with a fine-toothed comb (some of his comments
were flat-out incorrect), and traced the buffer in question back to
its source. It appears to be holding host-endian data, and it's being
cast to a little-endian type without an explicit conversion. The patch
I submitted fixes this by using the kernel-defined byte-order macros.

I've reached out to the reviewer both individually and via the mailing
list, and haven't heard back.

It's possible that I'm missing something, but I don't see what.

At what point is it appropriate to re-submit the patch?

Here's the link to the last message in the thread:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/4/10/1045

Best regards,
Perry


On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 5:58 PM, Tobin C. Harding <me at tobin.cc> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 05:28:46PM -0600, Perry Hooker wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I recently submitted a patch to the kernel mailing list:
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/3/21/712
>
> Link is broken.
>
>> I received some feedback on the patch. After a bit of polite
>> back-and-forth, the respondent stopped replying when I asked for more
>> information, and I haven't heard anything from the maintainers.
>
> No one *has* to respond to your email.
>
>> Based on my analysis (contained in the thread), I still think the
>> patch is correct & appropriate.
>
> Perhaps you just need to rework it a bit as the reviewer suggested?
>
>> What's the best way to determine if this is a good fix or not?
>> How should I proceed if the patch is, in fact, a good fix?
>
> If the patch was good it would have probably been picked up.
>
> I have found myself in similar positions. Often, since we are just
> beginners, there is some thing about the situation that we do not
> fully understand. This lack of understanding leads us to think we are
> correct when in fact we are not. Perhaps you could go back over the
> reviewers emails and think all around the code being discussed, make
> sure you understand every minute detail of what is being done.
>
> I have found reviewers to be unusually patient with us newbies, if you
> display that you have put in effort to try and understand their
> position most times you will get a response. If you don't perhaps the
> fix is not worth bothering with, the kernel is large there are always
> more things to work on.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Tobin.