On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 12:36:58PM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
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.
Cool, points noted. Thanks Dan Tobin