Toward a kernel maintainer's guide

The most pervasive and harmful of these is that programmers get confused by seeing more than one style. Appeals to this myth block improvements. In fact it is always easy to tell which of two styles in a file is the new one, and which is legacy. The useful unit of consistency is the equivalent of a paragraph -- a function, or a block in a bigger function.

The second is that any rule is as good as any another -- that all that matters is consistency. Not having objective evidence for one or other is not the same as that no such evidence is possible. Usually it would be way more work to collect than the difference is worth to one project, but there are plenty of projects conducting the experiment. So, sometimes any rule is better than no rule, but then comes time to step to a better rule. Take it, because it will make a difference.