[Linux-kernel-mentees] Possible new warning for checkpatch

[Lukas Bulwahn]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 4:23 PM Peilin Ye <yepeilin.cs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 08:28:23PM +0530, Dwaipayan Ray wrote:
> > Hi Lukas,
> > I was having a talk with Peilin and a possible new idea came up.
> > It's about lines in the commit message that start with a '#'.
> >
> > Normally if a patch contains lines starting with '#' in the commit
> > message, when they are applied they successfully appear in the
> > git log. But if a maintainer for some reason decides to rebase and
> > reword the commit message for whatever reason, the # lines are gone.
>
> Thanks for bringing this up Dwaipayan!
>
> Yes, for example, if one included some code examples (e.g. `#define ...`)
> in the commit message, then the maintainer applied, and reworded the
> commit to add their own Signed-off-by:, then all the # lines are gone.
>
> > Peilin had a look at it and he was able to successfully reproduce this
> > fault.
> >
> > Now would it make sense if a warning for such lines starting with '#' in
> > the commit message are emitted by checkpatch itself? I have no idea
> > what other developers do, so I could be wrong at this point. But I would
> > like your opinion.
>
> I admit it is a beginner's mistake, but I myself learned it in a hard
> way (i.e. by having a patch mainline'd then seeing these # lines gone),
> so personally I hope this becomes a new feature of checkpatch.
>

I think this makes sense and checkpatch should warn about that;
probably the easy way to fix it is just to indent such lines by a few
spaces, e.g., four spaces.

Lukas

> Thank you,
> Peilin Ye
>