Troubles with triaging syzbot reports [LWN.net]

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 17:58 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131)
In reply to: Troubles with triaging syzbot reports by Wol
Parent article: Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Maybe, but I don't think you can take this (the right to not demand everybody adapt to your way of working) arbitrarily far. For example, I remember well the golden times when all email was plaintext, but at the point where you are one in a million wanting that because html mail disrupts your workflow, then I'd say it's already your problem, and if you cannot perform properly because of your choices, then it's you who needs to adapt or at least find a workaround.

That's not to say that I, too, wouldn't find the problem complained of here very real and the response completely impossible to understand or accept

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Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 19:14 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

You do realize that anyone e.g. sending patches in HTML mail gets told to resend, don't you? With pointer to Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst or Documentation/process/email-clients.rst if whoever responds feels like being helpful. Which, I might add, contains the following bit:
-----------------------------------
Gmail (Web GUI)
***************

Does not work for sending patches.

Gmail web client converts tabs to spaces automatically.

At the same time it wraps lines every 78 chars with CRLF style line breaks
although tab2space problem can be solved with external editor.

Another problem is that Gmail will base64-encode any message that has a
non-ASCII character. That includes things like European names.
-----------------------------------

Might or might not be accurate these days, but that pretty much means "non-starter for kernel development, use their IMAP interface with a real MUA if you are forced to use a gmail account". Has nothing to do with the age, etc. - see the mentioned files for the real reasons. If gmail web client has solved these problems nowadays, a patch to Documentation/process/email-clients.rst along the lines of "here's how to set it up so it would do the right thing" would be welcome...

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 21:33 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, this happens in the kernel development context, and I'm not saying there's not a good reason for it (although I'm not saying the opposite either!).

Look, I'm no fan of all the new ways of doing things either. Rather, I just want to point that "it disrupts my/our way of working" only goes so far. It goes a lot more far, of course, in communities where lots of people want to do it like that (or there's people with sufficient power to just say this is how we do it), but even that has its limits...

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 16, 2022 4:27 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> Rather, I just want to point that "it disrupts my/our way of working" only goes so far.

True. But when "you" are asking "me" to respond to your bug report, "you" need to make that worth my while. So either a REALLY important bug, or a report that is REALLY easy to work with (or lots of dollars).

Troubles with triaging syzbot reports

Posted Dec 15, 2022 23:25 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

My email client does this to HTML email: https://github.com/linuxrocks123/MailTask/blob/bb6bfb8828...

It uses Aaron Swartz's html2text library to convert it to plaintext. It actually works pretty well.