Patch submission issue

[Scott Lovenberg]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 07:23:08AM +0530, Raghavendra wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am new to the kernel development community and I started off by fixing
>> small coding style errors in the drivers/staging directory. I've created
>> a patch for the same and sent it to the maintainer. The maintainer
>> replied to me something like this :
>>
>> "
>> Please don't do multiple things in the same patch, a single patch should
>> only do 1 thing.  So break this up into multiple patches.
>> "
>>
>> And my patch looks something like this :
>>
>>  From 7effd3d61c6ce08cd44df0a5ba3d1e9ac9ab5a98 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>>
>> From: Raghavendra <arrao at cdac.in>
>>
>> Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:04:52 +0530
>>
>> Subject: [PATCH] Staging: rtl8192e: dot11d: Fixed coding style issues
>>
>> Replaced 'printk' with 'netdev_info' and 'netdev_err' wherever necessary.
>>
>> Also fixed the coding issue cooresponding to line gap after the declarations.
>
> You said "also", so that means you did 2 different things.  Split this
> up into two different patches, one doing the first thing, and the second
> the second thing.
>
> See the documentation for how to do multiple patches in an email series.

To follow up on what Greg KH said, once you learn the git-send-email
workflow, you'll love it.  That being said, I still do a dry run and
only send to myself first (I have a gmail filter for this that tags my
own stuff) for larger sets of patches.  Make everyone's life easier by
testing your workflow once or twice before sending multi-patch sets.
It's embarrassing to have to send a series of patches three times
because you set the incorrect flag or forgot to add a signed-off-by
when you git-format-patch (and then forget to add it when using
git-send-email).  Please learn from my mistakes, I know I haven't. :)

-Scott.