Etiquette of submitting patches for fixing coding style.

[Eugene Voronkov]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Eugene Voronkov
> <eugene.voronkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I watched Kroah-Hartman's video[1] on submitting patches where he walks
> > through the process of fixing coding style.  I feel like this would be a
> > good way for me to jump into the process but I need more information.  At
> > what point do code style patches stop being more trouble then they're
> worth
> > to the maintainers?  For example, running checkpatch.pl against all
> files is
> > showing around 3 non-trivial style violations per file.  Would a patch
> > fixing 12 violations across 4 files be worth submitting?
> >
> > 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLBrBBImJt4
>
> Before spending time on this, read the email on the ext4 list from a
> couple weeks ago.
>
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-ext4&m=135048406513682&w=2
>
> Basically pure checkpatch.pl generated patches are discouraged by a
> lot of maintainers.
>
> They break existing out of tree patches that people may be working on.
>
> The solution is to use checkpatch.pl when you are already working in a
> relevant code area.
>
> Then it becomes:
>
> 0/2  This is a patch series to fix such and such bug
> 1/2  checkpatch.pl patch to clean up the formatting of the files I'm
> working on.
> 2/2 patch to fix the bug
>
> I see that sequence all the time and the checkpatch cleanup is always
> taken.
>
> But a sequence of purely checkpatch cleanups will likely be rejected.
>
> fyi: Robert Day just asked for help cleaning up the Doc Book stuff.
>
> Doc Book pull comments out of the .c files and creates documentation.
> To clean it up, patches to the source files will be required.  These
> are more likely to be accepted.
>
> So you could to a doc book series like:
>
> 0/2 a patch series to correct the documentation for xyz subsystem
> 1/2 checkpatch cleanup of the 2 files with doc updates
> 2/2 doc updates
>
> That pairing may actually get accepted.  (I can't say I remember it
> being tried.)
>
> Greg
>

Yea, seems like they would cause more problems than they solve.

Thanks for the heads up.  I've been looking at those.
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