On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Greg Freemyer <[email protected]>wrote
> All, > > The last couple of days on the ext4 list there has been some > discussion of ./scripts/checkpatch.pl and ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl. > > It looks like a simple whitespace patch is going to be rejected. (surpise!) > > If you haven't seen it, I think it is worth a read. Especially if > you're a newbie. (As I assume the originator of the thread was.) > Thanks for this, Greg - much appreciated. This really was interesting to follow. I thought the following comment from Ted Ts'o summed the discussion up nicely: > > If it's used by newbies who want to get warned about obvious things, that's > fine. If it's used by maintainers as an automated way to catch nits, that's also > fine. Maintainers are experts who know when it's OK to disregard flase positives. > > What really annoys me is newbies who use checkpatch.pl in its --file > mode,and then assume that every single warning is a deadly bug that much be > patched.Scripts by definitions are stupid, and don't substitute for > thinking. checkpatch.pl at least as the excuse that it has some valid > non-stupid uses. But I'm not convinced get_maintainers.pl has the same > excuse. > I at least never use it. I'll look through the MAINTAINERS file by hand, or > I'll use git log by hand, and let my human intelligence figure out whether > or not the patches that are turned up constitute "those that do real work", > or are bullshit checkpatch.pl cleanup patches. Training people to use a > script that by defintion can't be smart enough to make these distinction > ultimately is a huge disservice to newbies (and experts won't use > get_maintinaer.pl anyway, because they will want to know the context). > I'm following the drivers mailing list trying to get a feel for protocol at the moment and one of the things that really surprised me was that there were patches being sent for pure code tidy-up re-formats (i.e. not as part of actually fixing bugs, optimizing code etc.). I had previously read Jon Corbet's 'How to Participate in the Linux Community - a Guide to the Development Process' where he made the following point: Developers may > start to generate reformatting patches as a way of gaining familiarity > with the process, or as a way of getting their name into the kernel > changelogs – or both. But pure coding style fixes are seen as noise > by the development community; they tend to get a chilly reception. > So this type of patch is best avoided. It is natural to fix the style of a > piece of code while working on it for other reasons, but coding style > changes should not be made for their own sake. > > The ext4 list discussion seems to indicate that this is still good advice for would-be contributors to follow... :-) (I'm also impressed by the patience and diplomatic attitudes of maintainers like Greg KH and Ted Ts'o who presumably must keep getting sent stuff like this. :-) ) Thanks, Julie >
