[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 12:02:23 -0700
josh at joshtriplett.org wrote:


> > --- Some Maintainer's prefer these styles ---
> > 
> >  These are some extra styles that maintainers prefer. Some are strict
> >  about these, others may not care. It doesn't hurt to add them.
> 
> A world of *no*.  If your style is not universal, and you can't get a
> general consensus among kernel maintainers that it should be a
> requirement across the entire kernel, then *no*.  We should not have
> per-subsystem formatting rules.
>

Um, we have it today, and we'll have it tomorrow. Sorry, but the Linux
kernel is not run by management. It's a huge community effort with
some of the brightest minds in the world working on it. Each subsystem
of the kernel is a project in itself. We're lucky we have the consensus
that we have.

 
> > /*
> >  * What is the question?
> >  * To add a space at the top of a comment?
> >  */
> > 
> > /* Or not to add a space at the top of a comment?
> >  * That is the question!
> >  */
> 
> While I'm not going to advocate that we mass-fix existing code in a
> subsystem for consistent formatting, this is *exactly* the kind of thing
> that we do not need any more of; one such idiosyncrasy is one too many.

Then there's no issue here. Each maintainer is free to tell people to
x-mas tree their variables or not. Look, kernel development is complex
and if your biggest hangup of getting a patch into the kernel is that
the maintainer requires you to modify some whitespace on rearrange your
variables, then you probably should get out of kernel development and
enter a field of bike shed exterior design.

-- Steve