Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v4 1/2] xen/arm: extend fdt_property_interrupts

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 1 Aug 2019, at 13:41, Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Viktor,

On 01/08/2019 13:26, Viktor Mitin wrote:

Hi Julien and Volodymyr,
On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 3:52 PM Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

It is recommended (and probably required, but I can't find exact place
in the rules) to include cover letter if you are sending more that one
patch in series. This will ease up review process, because reviewer will
know what to expect in the series.

 > There is no such requirement, only recommendation.

It is a strong recommendation: "If you need to send more than one patches (which
normally means you're sending a patch series with cover letter),".

I did not put it since this is simple short patch series and both
patches in this series have been discussed previously, so it is known
what it is about.

For a first, if you don't have a cover letter then the threading in e-mail
client would look weird:
    [PATCH v4 1/2] xen/arm: extend fdt_property_interrupts
       |-> [PATCH v4 2/2] xen/arm: merge make_timer_node and make_timer_domU_node

I tend to hid anything within the thread so I have only one title. For the title
it is not clear to me what's the purpose of the e-mail.

The cover letter is also used to keep a summary of what was discussed and the
overall goal. It does not matter if it is just a few lines. This is also a good
place to have a discussion of the overall series (i.e not specific to a patch).

Lastly, you may have new reviewers that haven't followed the previous
discussion. You have also reviewers like me which receive a few hundreds e-mails
per week (just counting my inbox so e-mail I am CCed to). While I have a good
memory, I can't possibly remember everything single e-mails.

So the cover letter is a good place to explain what changes have been done
between series. You can also do that per-patch.

Speaking about changelog, I would highly recommend to keep all the changelog
from v1. This gives us an idea what happen over the review.

Thank you for this great and detailed argumentation provided. It makes
sense, so probably Xen patches wiki should be updated with this
information and cover letter should become not a recommendation, but a
rule.

Update to the wiki are always welcomed.

I still have an action to rework https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Submitting_Xen_Project_Patches and migrate the content to the sphinx docs

@Victor: can you quickly point out where we recommend to use cover letters (if you remember). I thought it was a requirement

Lars

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