[U-Boot] checkpatch - theory and practice [was: [PATCH v2 3/6] TFTP: rename "server" to "remote"]

[Detlev Zundel]

Hi Luca,

>>> It's needed for checkpatch compliance.
>> I'm trying to understand the problems involved, but looking at this
>> again, it is not clear to me what you say here.  When I run your version
>> 1 of the patches (where you only do the rename) through checkpatch, I
>> get:
>>
>>    WARNING: line over 80 characters
>>    #116: FILE: net/tftp.c:59:
>>    +static int	TftpRemotePort;		/* The UDP port at their end		*/
>>
>>    WARNING: consider using kstrto* in preference to simple_strtol
>>    #215: FILE: net/tftp.c:619:
>>    +		TftpRemotePort = simple_strtol(ep, NULL, 10);
>>
>>    total: 0 errors, 2 warnings, 99 lines checked
>>
>>    /home/dzu/transfer/p2 has style problems, please review.  If any of these errors
>>    are false positives report them to the maintainer, see
>>    CHECKPATCH in MAINTAINERS.
>>
>> So I'm not sure why you say that the other changes are needed for
>> checkpatch.  What exactly do you mean by this?
>
> All the comments were nicely columned before my patchset. Reducing the
> length of a line would have broken this.
>
> I chose to change all of them in order to preserve the pre-existing
> coding style.

Ok, this makes sense, alas the wording "it's needed for checkpatch
compliance" was somewhat misleading.

Ideally only the relevant changes should be in one commit and
re-indentation to align everything again should be in a separate commit.
As we saw that checkpatch also looks at context lines, this commit
usually needs to be logically _before_ your own changes.  Probably the
easiest way to achieve this is to commit the changes separately and
reorder them with git rebase -i.

I amended the wiki page[1] in the hope of getting more light into these
things.

Cheers
  Detlev

[1] http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/Patches

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