Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:19:35 -0800 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: Impact: (was Re: [PATCH] update rwlock initialization for nat_table) |
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On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:10:39 +0300 Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:20:19AM -0800, David Miller wrote: > > > update rwlock initialization for nat_table > > > > > > Impact: clean up > > > > > > The commit e099a173573ce1ba171092aee7bb3c72ea686e59 > > > (netfilter: netns nat: per-netns NAT table) renamed the > > > nat_table from __nat_table to nat_table without updating the > > > __RW_LOCK_UNLOCKED(__nat_table.lock). > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com> > > > > Applied to net-2.6, thanks Steven. > > > > As Andrew mentioned this is a bug (albeit a "nano-bug" as you > > called it :-) so I removed the Impact line in the commit > > message when applying this. > > Speaking of Impact: lines, is this a new fashion or what? > > Looking at the ones which are already in official tree, they are either > trivially duplicating Subject: line, or effectively duplicating Subject: line, > or cover up for insufficiently informative (read: badly written) Subject: line, > or simply useless. > > > Subject: sched: CPU remove deadlock fix > Impact: fix possible deadlock in CPU hot-remove path > > What prevented to write "Subject: sched: fix possible deadlock in CPU hot-remove path"? > > > AMD IOMMU: __unmap_single: check for bad_dma_address instead of 0 > Impact: minor fix > > Well... > > I have an idea on how to make them remotely useful, but can we agree that there is > a problem arising here?
heh, I must say that the ones I've seen haven't been very useful.
However... Given the amount of time I (and others, to a lesser extent) spend complaining about and scratching heads over crappy changelogs, we would benefit from having a standard changelog template.
Something which guides people to creating a good changelog. But it would have to be short, and carefully written. It should learn from history, to wit:
- ./REPORTING-BUGS has a template and afaik it has never elicited any useful information.
- Documentation/SubmittingPatches has info on how to write a changelog, and people blithely ignore it.
- kerneldoc provide a template of sorts, and we see that filling out templates puts people's brains into "filling out a template" mode, rather than into "communicating information" mode.
An interesting problem.
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