Git forges [LWN.net]

Git forges

Posted Oct 16, 2025 19:11 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Git forges by mb
Parent article: Large language models for patch review

> Well no, all git forges and CI solve this problem very well.

By "very well" you mean "completely at someone else's expense"?

It's reasonable to expect folks to perform basic sanity checks *prior* to submitting a patch. Even better if they are in the form of local pre-commit/push hooks so that the central infrastructure never even sees the patch until it's clean.

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Git forges

Posted Oct 16, 2025 19:15 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (3 responses)

Sure. And cute ponies would be great.

In reality, though, it's extremely cheap to run checkpatch.pl in a pull request action and then avoid needless human work on the overloaded maintainer side.
Because that's the actually expensive thing. Not 0.2 seconds of compute time spent.

Git forges

Posted Oct 16, 2025 19:42 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Sure. And cute ponies would be great.
> avoid needless human work on the overloaded maintainer side.
> Because that's the actually expensive thing. Not 0.2 seconds of compute time spent.

How is "automatically running things locally" needless human work?

Git forges

Posted Oct 16, 2025 20:01 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

Because I have never said this?
That's obvious even from the part that you quoted.

And because many submitters won't run your scripts locally, just like many won't run checkpatch.pl today.
If you as a maintainer want some checkers to be run, you need to ensure that on your end or on the forge that you control.
Just establishing a rule that every submitter has to run a checker is never going to fully work.

Git forges

Posted Oct 17, 2025 1:22 UTC (Fri) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

The project I work on encourages you to run checkpatch.pl, but also if you don't, it's run by the code management infrastructure on all submissions. It takes ~no time and the cost is negligible.

If you remember to do it locally and fix the complaints, great - but you can also screw up or forget. It can be an *and* situation, especially when something is cheap.

It also lets everyone else know whether or not you did it, which has a benefit too (I think).