[Xen-devel] differing opinions between maintainers vs patch acks

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

All,

it's been a (not very often, but anyway) recurring situation that in
order to get an ack on some patch I had to make adjustments which
I didn't agree with. Since all maintainers opinions are supposed to be
equal, it is not really clear to me whether in such cases it should
really be the reviewing maintainer's rather than the submitting
maintainer's opinion which controls what actually goes into the tree.
When there's an odd number of maintainers for a given piece of
code, it may be acceptable to pull in a 3rd maintainer to break ties,
but pulling in a non-maintainer (e.g. some [other] committer) to
help out seems not really appropriate to me.

And just to clarify - such discussions aren't normally about aspects
that affect how the resulting code would work, but just how the
code should look like (see e.g. the thread rooted at
https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2017-05/msg00068.html
for the most recent example, where the question is how to
express numbers and how to name labels), i.e. things in the end
often called "bike shedding".

My proposal is for the submitting maintainer's taste to take
preference over the reviewing maintainer's one in such cases.
And just to avoid any doubt - I don't mean this to extend to
cases where correctness of the code would be affected (albeit
I admit there may still be cases left sitting in a gray area in the
middle).

Jan


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