[U-Boot] Question about Coding-Style

[Stefano Babic <sbabic@denx.de>]

Hi Hannes,

On 04/02/2014 13:50, Hannes Petermaier wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've read on the U-Boot website about coding style. They say 'All
> contributions to U-Boot should conform to the Linux kernel coding style'.
> Further i've read this link and there are at least 2 things which i have
> troubles with.
> 
> 1)
> a tab-ident is 8 spaces 

Right

> (in eclipse for example with the built in K&R has
> 4 characters). With 8 characters per TAB the problem from point 2 enters
> very, very fast.
> 
> 2)
> a line ist limited to 80 characters (maybe thus comes from very old days
> where displays couldn't show more than this and scrolling was very
> expensive). is this state of the art ?

Yes, it is. Same rule as in kernel.

> 
> In fact i've found a lot of files within the u-boot code which do not obey
> to this rules.

I cannot tell for each exceptions you found. Maybe the code is very old,
and it slipped into mainline without fixing the lenght. There are also
some well-known exception (generally for tables), where a longer line
was accepted after discussion in the ML to increase readability.
(tables for pinmux, as example arch/arm/include/asm/arch-mx6/mx6dl_pins.h).

> 
> Now my question is, how strong are this two points ?

They are strong until there is a general acceptance on the ML to drop
the rule. However, the rule was already discussed in the past (you can
dig deep in archives), and the result was to maintain it, exactly as it
is valid for linux.


> checkpatch.pl rails against a patch file with a lot of warnings if there
> is a line longer than 80bytes, also it takes TABS as 8 spaces.

checkpatch is run before merging a patch into a merge tree by
custodians. If checkpatch reports errors, they must be fixed.

> 
> whats your opinion about this ?
> 
> Last question:
> Is this mailing list the right place of discussing such things ?
> 

I think you are in the right place to discuss these topics ;-)

Best regards,
Stefano Babic

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