Etiquette of submitting patches for fixing coding style.

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2012, Greg Freemyer wrote:

> 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

  if you want to get started making fixes and submitting patches, i
suggest doc fixes as an easy way to jump in for the simple reason that
just making changes to documentation shouldn't break anything. :-)
there is a separate list just for kernel documentation:

  http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-doc

so you know you'll be on-topic there chatting about documentation.
from the perspective of someone who has no *official* connection with
the kernel but who's submitted lots of pedantic patches over the
years, let me make a couple suggestions.

  first, a *lot* of what's under the Documentation/ directory is
absurdly old and worthless, and should probably be just deleted.
ignore that stuff. other stuff under there is perfectly up-to-date,
and should be left alone.

  the middle ground is the stuff that can be updated to reflect the
current kernel, so pick a single file under there that reflects
something you're interested in, start going through it, make
corrections, and submit the final patch to the linux-doc list.  try to
work with a single file or topic at a time, it's easier to get your
patches accepted.

  post on the kernel-doc stuff coming shortly, for the interested.

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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