[OSSNA] Intro to kernel hacking tutorial

[Dan Carpenter]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 12:50:55PM +1000, Tobin C. Harding wrote:
> Outcome will (hopefully) be a small patch set into drivers/staging/.
> (Don't worry Greg only one group got to this stage last time, you
> won't get flooded with patches :)

We're good at reviewing floods of patches.  Send away.

In the end what we want is people who will take over a driver and
understand it completely and become the maintainer.  We've had a few
people that did appointed themselves to become the maintainer of a
random driver and move it out of staging.  But even if people don't make
it all the way to become a maintainer, it's nice when they start down
that path by focusing on one driver and trying to understand it as much
as possible.

Most of the time when you look at a new staging driver, then you do want
to clean up the white space just because it's hard to look at
non-standard code.  So that's the first step.  But then maybe start at
the probe and release functions and clean it up.  Keep your eyes open
to any other mistakes or bugs you see.  Write them down.  Then the
ioctls.  Etc.  Look at the TODO too.

The other thing I wish people knew was about the relationship with
maintainers.  When you start out, you're virtually anonymous for the
first couple patchsets.  We get so many and they blend together so we
don't remember your name.  So don't think that we mean anything
personally if we don't apply your patch.  We have forgotten about the
patch as soon as we reply to it.  Don't panic and resend quickly.  You
will be too stressed.  Wait until the next day.

In staging we really want to apply patches (unless it's in staging
because we're going to remove the code).  I get annoyed with other
staging reviewers who NAK patches because "I don't like churn" or
whatever.

On the other hand, patches just "silencing checkpatch.pl" is not a valid
justification for sending a patch.  Patches should make the code more
readable.

Anyway, maintainers are not monsters.  Very few people have made me
annoyed to the point where I refuse to review their code.  And everyone
else is in my good books so that's fine.

regards,
dan carpenter