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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

These small patches create some overhead for maintainers. He actually said in the follow up message that grouping them together is fine.

Please at least merge all those small fixes into a larger patchset, and with a good cover letter to explain the reason (and auto-tool to do the change if possible) for all the involved maintainers, so that all of us are on the same page.

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I understand the overhead, but it seems like bundling lots of unrelated cleanup fixes into one large commit would make it easier to sneak in something nefarious.

They’re still going to be reviewed, and if the cover letter says “typo fixes” and one of the patches fixes more than a typo, that would be an instant red flag. A single bigger patch set is faster and easier to review.

My understanding is that they're not necessarily asking for the commits to be squashed, they're asking for them to be submitted together as a patch series.

Patch series are an important part of a healthy review workflow because they allow both a micro and a macro view of changes. I have written about this before: http://nhaehnle.blogspot.com/2020/06/they-want-to-be-small-t...

I'd argue it would make it LESS likely; seeing a hundred "cleanup" merge requests that are all basically the same thing vs a single one where something more than just cleanup would stand out.

I think the general idea would be something like, "Fix spelling errors in log messages" and bundle several changes that do that.

All parts of the patch have to be reviewed regardless. It just saves one session startup/tear down per patch.

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