[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] checkpatch/Codingstyle and trivial patch spam

[Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>]

A very late proposal, maybe related to Joe Perches thread about checkpatch and
previous discussions about getting new people.

There are a decent amount of patches just dealing with checkpatch warnings or
Codingtyle things and sometimes the quality of these patches is not the best.

1. What is the general opinion about this patch class? It seems to be trade of
between attracting new developers vs. letting people create a huge amount of
patches for no good reason. The acceptance of these patches seems to differ from
maintainer to maintainer. Are there ideas how to improve things for newbies
without inviting patch bombers?

 2. Some patches are created due to the CodingStyle document, e.g. just
changing the name of labels for gotos. Does it make sense to make CodingStyle
less specific again to avoid these change? Or maybe add some rules in
SubmittingPatches to always think twice before sending patches to existing code.
Any better ideas?

3. CodingStyle seems to get changes which have no ACK or Reviewed-by that seem
to be controversial.  e.g.
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/commit/Documentation/CodingStyle?id=865a1caa4b6b886babdd9d67e7c3608be4567a51
suggested to indent labels with a space, and was then immediately followed by
patches. Is there a process in place to verify and challenge such changes?

4.  Does it make sense to make checkpatch less agressive on files than on
patches to avoid a big chunk of changes on existing code?

Christian