Re: Ask for help, about the trivial patches.

[Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>]

jimmy bahuleyan wrote:
> TripleX Chung wrote:
>> But I still have problems.
>> Trivial means "of little worth or importance". But some of the examples
>> in the rules are important, like "runtime fixes". Spell fixes must be
>> unimportant, but most of the runtime fixes like memory leaks or NULL
>> pointers must be important. I was still a little confused with them.
>>
> 
> Literally, yes. But look at it from a s/w engineering point of view.
> 
> A NULL pointer deref is important, but it is also a *very local* and
> very obvious fix (one that doesn't need extensive testing, one that
> doesn't have effects spread out over many modules that requires great
> amount of thought).
> 
> So such things are trivial bug-fixes.

Yes; it's more the /handling/ of the patch that is "trivial" in a strict
sense.  Bug fixes should usually go through maintainers.  But for fixes
which are obvious == easy to verify, trivial@kernel.org makes sense as a
central point for submitters to turn to, to lower the barrier for
submission.
-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=== -=== =----
http://arcgraph.de/sr/