Re: Process to push changes to include/linux/types.h

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 23:26:34 +0200 (CEST)
Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de> wrote:

> 
> On Thursday 2010-10-14 21:54, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> >> A patch was posted a bit ago by agruen which made a change to
> >> include/linux/types.h changing aligned_u64 to __aligned_u64 and exposing
> >> this new type to userspace.
> >> [...]
> >> I'm a little stuck as to the right path forward.  I normally would have
> >> had no qualms about adding __aligned_u64 to types.h in the notification
> >> tree and pushing it to Linus next go-round and then the net tree could
> >> convert and potentially drop the old aligned_u64 type (but again that
> >> would be outside the net tree).  Since Dave isn't willing to add the
> >> type and I don't want to get called too many bad names
> >
> >The usual approach here is someone sends it to me and I send it to
> >Linus ;)
> 
> We tinkered on types.h before, with the change originating in the Netfilter
> subtree, and nobody, not even Dave, complained.

It doesn't matter much at all what tree a change goes through.  What
matters more is that the appropriate people know about and see the
change.

For example, I never even knew that aligned_u64 and friends existed (it
got secretly merged via the netfilter tree, apparently).  So when I
review code (and I review a lot of code), I don't think to nag people
if they open-code it.  <greps>.  That doesn't seem to have happened yet.

> (See v2.6.24-6165-gc82a5cb)

hm, what does that mean.