[RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

[RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

[Joshua Crofts]

Hi all,

I was browsing lore and checked out the ksummit mailing list, where the
topic about guiding new contributors arose [1]. New contributors tend to
make the same mistakes when sending patches, causing reviewers to point
these out all the time over and over again. For IIO, this is definitely the
case (I myself send an email telling people not to send a v2 in reply to a
v1 several times a week). Other subsystems have a "Maintainer entry profile"
that contains subsystem-specific process info (DAMON for example [2]) and 
(sometimes even [3]) a document describing the code style of the subsystem
(this would be a great place where to mention things like not using
kernel.h in new drivers etc.). I'm happy to create both of the documents
but it's always great to hear other people's ideas! 

Second of all, the idea of having a bot that would automatically detect new
contributors (i.e. the email they're submitting the patch with doesn't show
up in `git log --author`) and send an email reminding them of the basic rules
(while also referring to the entry profile mentioned above) sounds like a
great idea, but of course hosting and maintaining are pain points.

Please let me know what you think of the above ideas!

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit/87y0ekm9nw.fsf@trenco.lwn.net/
[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/mm/damon/maintainer-profile.rst
[3] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/hwmon/submitting-patches.rst

-- 
Kind regards,
Joshua Crofts

Re: [RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

[Maxwell Doose]

On Mon Aug 17, 2026 at 4:18 AM CDT
Joshua Crofts <joshua.crofts1@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was browsing lore and checked out the ksummit mailing list, where the
> topic about guiding new contributors arose [1]. New contributors tend to
> make the same mistakes when sending patches, causing reviewers to point
> these out all the time over and over again. For IIO, this is definitely the
> case (I myself send an email telling people not to send a v2 in reply to a
> v1 several times a week). Other subsystems have a "Maintainer entry profile"
> that contains subsystem-specific process info (DAMON for example [2]) and 
> (sometimes even [3]) a document describing the code style of the subsystem
> (this would be a great place where to mention things like not using
> kernel.h in new drivers etc.). I'm happy to create both of the documents
> but it's always great to hear other people's ideas! 
>

Took a look at [1] and it looks like these are issues across multiple
mailing lists so maybe we should add these to the main
submitting-patches documentation? And then for other IIO-specific things
we can put those in a maintainer entry profile.

> Second of all, the idea of having a bot that would automatically detect new
> contributors (i.e. the email they're submitting the patch with doesn't show
> up in `git log --author`) and send an email reminding them of the basic rules
> (while also referring to the entry profile mentioned above) sounds like a
> great idea, but of course hosting and maintaining are pain points.
>

Hm...this one is more difficult. I guess a good first question to ask
would be "can this be hosted on kernel.org infastructure?" But maybe we
can also ask Greg KH about how he does his automated bot.

thanks,
max

> Please let me know what you think of the above ideas!
>
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit/87y0ekm9nw.fsf@trenco.lwn.net/
> [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/mm/damon/maintainer-profile.rst
> [3] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/hwmon/submitting-patches.rst

Re: [RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

[David Lechner]

On 8/17/26 4:18 AM, Joshua Crofts wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was browsing lore and checked out the ksummit mailing list, where the
> topic about guiding new contributors arose [1]. New contributors tend to
> make the same mistakes when sending patches, causing reviewers to point
> these out all the time over and over again. For IIO, this is definitely the
> case (I myself send an email telling people not to send a v2 in reply to a
> v1 several times a week). Other subsystems have a "Maintainer entry profile"
> that contains subsystem-specific process info (DAMON for example [2]) and 
> (sometimes even [3]) a document describing the code style of the subsystem
> (this would be a great place where to mention things like not using
> kernel.h in new drivers etc.). I'm happy to create both of the documents
> but it's always great to hear other people's ideas! 

I think there are plenty of new contributor (to the kernel) guides out there.
People just don't read them. So I don't think we need another. Nothing wrong
with trying to make the existing guides more clear/easy to understand though.

A subsystem doc that has our code style quirks and idioms would be helpful
though as I don't think that has every been written down in a single place.
Especially useful now since AI reviewers will read it even if humans don't.

> 
> Second of all, the idea of having a bot that would automatically detect new
> contributors (i.e. the email they're submitting the patch with doesn't show
> up in `git log --author`) and send an email reminding them of the basic rules
> (while also referring to the entry profile mentioned above) sounds like a
> great idea, but of course hosting and maintaining are pain points.
> 
> Please let me know what you think of the above ideas!
> 
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit/87y0ekm9nw.fsf@trenco.lwn.net/
> [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/mm/damon/maintainer-profile.rst
> [3] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/hwmon/submitting-patches.rst
> 

Re: [RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

[Joshua Crofts]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:31:45 -0500
David Lechner <dlechner@baylibre.com> wrote:

> On 8/17/26 4:18 AM, Joshua Crofts wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I was browsing lore and checked out the ksummit mailing list, where the
> > topic about guiding new contributors arose [1]. New contributors tend to
> > make the same mistakes when sending patches, causing reviewers to point
> > these out all the time over and over again. For IIO, this is definitely the
> > case (I myself send an email telling people not to send a v2 in reply to a
> > v1 several times a week). Other subsystems have a "Maintainer entry profile"
> > that contains subsystem-specific process info (DAMON for example [2]) and 
> > (sometimes even [3]) a document describing the code style of the subsystem
> > (this would be a great place where to mention things like not using
> > kernel.h in new drivers etc.). I'm happy to create both of the documents
> > but it's always great to hear other people's ideas!   
> 
> I think there are plenty of new contributor (to the kernel) guides out there.
> People just don't read them. So I don't think we need another. Nothing wrong
> with trying to make the existing guides more clear/easy to understand though.
> 
> A subsystem doc that has our code style quirks and idioms would be helpful
> though as I don't think that has every been written down in a single place.
> Especially useful now since AI reviewers will read it even if humans don't.

Yes, but it shouldn't be limited to code style quirks - I highly doubt new
contributors develop against the togreg tree of iio.git for example.

I'd propose 2 documents:
- entry profile - documenting the review cycle, patchwork, point people over to
  Sashiko, relevant git tree etc.
- code style - the TODO is fine for existing problems in the subsystem but doesn't
  point out idioms we have in IIO, i.e. not using (the awful) kernel.h, preferring
  devm_* functions, not failing on a mismatched ID to ensure fallback etc. This is
  stuff that appears a lot in patches.

Whether new contributors read these is up to them (from my experience if you write
decent docs people still won't read them and ask pointless questions), nevertheless
if we suspect someone is new we can just point them to these documents instead of
reiterating the same over and over again.

-- 
Kind regards,
Joshua Crofts

Re: [RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

[Joshua Crofts]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:50:29 -0500
"Maxwell Doose" <maxwell@maxwelld.cc> wrote:

> On Mon Aug 17, 2026 at 4:18 AM CDT
> Joshua Crofts <joshua.crofts1@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I was browsing lore and checked out the ksummit mailing list, where the
> > topic about guiding new contributors arose [1]. New contributors tend to
> > make the same mistakes when sending patches, causing reviewers to point
> > these out all the time over and over again. For IIO, this is definitely the
> > case (I myself send an email telling people not to send a v2 in reply to a
> > v1 several times a week). Other subsystems have a "Maintainer entry profile"
> > that contains subsystem-specific process info (DAMON for example [2]) and 
> > (sometimes even [3]) a document describing the code style of the subsystem
> > (this would be a great place where to mention things like not using
> > kernel.h in new drivers etc.). I'm happy to create both of the documents
> > but it's always great to hear other people's ideas! 
> >  
> 
> Took a look at [1] and it looks like these are issues across multiple
> mailing lists so maybe we should add these to the main
> submitting-patches documentation? And then for other IIO-specific things
> we can put those in a maintainer entry profile.

Fair, the "don't reply with a v2 to a v1" comment was a bit off considering
I was mainly talking about IIO specific documentation, however having a central
document (or documents) of sorts for the IIO code style and process is a nice
thing to have, I'm sure even the most seasoned reviewers forget stuff occasionally.

> 
> > Second of all, the idea of having a bot that would automatically detect new
> > contributors (i.e. the email they're submitting the patch with doesn't show
> > up in `git log --author`) and send an email reminding them of the basic rules
> > (while also referring to the entry profile mentioned above) sounds like a
> > great idea, but of course hosting and maintaining are pain points.
> >  
> 
> Hm...this one is more difficult. I guess a good first question to ask
> would be "can this be hosted on kernel.org infastructure?" But maybe we
> can also ask Greg KH about how he does his automated bot.

From what I gathered, kernel.org doesn't really provide infrastructure for this
type of stuff :( If you look at [1] you see that netdev got overloaded with patches
so they made their own bot for this exact purpose. One could just spin up a
Docker container that periodically pulls from lore using lei and runs a git log
with the author's email against mainline/testing/togreg.

I believe it was David who originally proposed an IIO bot [1], primarily for code
inspection.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/4742ea18-f3df-46dd-aad4-18d1e5f03f7f@baylibre.com/

-- 
Kind regards,
Joshua Crofts