Question regarding upstreaming patches written by multiple people and checkpatch

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 06:25:46AM -0500, Joseph Bisch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to upstream a patch set that wasn't written by me. The
> original patch has a lot of warnings and errors reported by
> checkpatch. Someone else corrected some of those with another patch
> and I added on a third patch correcting the rest of the warnings and
> errors that I thought were appropriate to fix.
> 
> When checkpatch is run on the file that the patches affect, the output
> looks okay to me, but when I run checkpatch on the patches themselves,
> the patches still have the same errors and warnings, because I made my
> changes in a separate patch.
> 
> So is it okay to have checkpatch errors/warnings for individual
> patches as long as the patch series as a whole is reasonably
> checkpatch clean

Usually, yes, this is fine.

But it can depend on the subsystem / area of the kernel you are
submitting this for, what type of code is this?  What maintainer(s) are
you going to have to send the patches to?

> or should I be amending my changes to the original
> commit and squashing the other cleanup patch into the first patch, so
> that I am left with one patch that passes checkpatch?

I would preserve original authorship and signed-off-by as much as
possible.

Hope this helps,

greg k-h