Question regarding upstreaming patches written by multiple people and checkpatch

[Joseph Bisch]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:46 PM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
> 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?

The patch set[0] (link doesn't include my patch) is a driver for the
quadrature encoder pulse decoder unit on the AM33xx series SoC.
According to get_maintainer.pl, I am sending the patches to OMAP
DEVICE TREE SUPPORT maintainers, OPEN FIRMWARE AND FLATTENED DEVICE
TREE BINDINGS maintainers, the ARM PORT maintainer, you and the other
CHAR and MISC DRIVERS supporter, and the mailing lists.

>> 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.

Okay. The author of the second patch said I should squash it into the
first (because it was just an upstream kernel interface change), so I
put the commit message from the second patch (because it was just one
line) in brackets between the two sign off lines as I've seen
maintainers do when they need to make a last minute change before
accepting a patch. Should I have done it that way? Or would you still
keep them as separate patches?

> Hope this helps,

Yes it does. Thanks!

[0] - https://github.com/RobertCNelson/linux-dev/tree/master/patches/beaglebone/eqep

Joseph