Toward a kernel maintainer's guide

Posted Nov 27, 2018 15:29 UTC (Tue) by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
In reply to: Toward a kernel maintainer's guide by mfuzzey
Parent article: Toward a kernel maintainer's guide

Having different coding style rules for different parts of the kernel seems to be mostly a pain for everyone involved and I don't see any reasonable justification other than inertia.

I can think of a few.

It takes effort to reach consensus: is a flame war on Christmas-tree declaration ordering really such a high priority?

People have more fun if they're given a little leeway.

The original Documentation/CodingStyle was 193 lines. Looks like currently Documentation/process/codingstyle.rst is 1079 lines. I wonder if people read it.

Toward a kernel maintainer's guide

Posted Nov 30, 2018 11:30 UTC (Fri) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link]

Questions about reasons for doing x or y should always be welcome. In practice, they sound so marginal that readers just skip. Walking through the code together seems to be gone for good, or perhaps it's just not supported by the tools?