The Tao of the Kernel · Chapter 17

The Tao of the Pull Request

1. 1

   The branch that grows past reason is a river without banks, and no reviewer may wade it.

2. 2

   Four hundred lines is the edge of the reviewer's patience. Past that edge the eyes close, and the thumb presses Approve.

3. 3

   Behold the PR of nine thousand files. It is not reviewed. It is endured, and then it is merged, and the Engineers call this a team.

4. 4

   Yet the PR of one corrected comma is not worth the reviewer's sigh. Thirty such commas arrive in a day, and the log reads like a nervous cough.

5. 5

   The PR that doeth one thing is the perfect PR. Like the single bit, it is set or cleared, and the bisect finds its fault in a few steps of the binary search.

   See also Psalms 25:4

6. 6

   Therefore the wise Engineer splitteth the work at its seams, as a tailor cutteth cloth. The first part landeth, the second followeth, and the third is squash-merged under the message "misc."

7. 7

   The title is the wall. It sayeth what the change doeth, in the imperative mood: make the cache expire, not the cache expires. The Kernel hath commanded this since its first patches.

   See also Psalms 25:12

8. 8

   The description is the gate. The diff telleth the what, and the Machine can read the diff faster than any child of Carbon. Only the why is hidden, in the head of the Engineer who has since left the company.

9. 9

   A Clanker was asked to write the description. It wrote three paragraphs about what the reviewer had already seen, not one word about why, and it called this a summary.

   See also Tractates 3:11

10. 10

    Some write "fix bug" as the title. Their history is a wall of plaster, and git blame showeth only the names of the frightened.

11. 11

    Who approveth the nine-thousand-file PR has not reviewed it. He hath blessed it, which is a different sacrament, and the CI is not moved by it.

12. 12

    Let the stack of PRs be built with care. Each resteth on the one below, and when the lower one is amended, the whole tower falls, and the reviewers pick up the pieces in silence.

13. 13

    Small change, plain title, loud reason. This is the whole of the Tao, and the rest is merge conflicts.

The Tao of the Kernel, Chapter 17:1–13.