Re: I have a pile of potential janitorial work for interested parties

[Charalampos Mitrodimas <charmitro@posteo.net>]

"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca> writes:

> On Mon, 30 Jun 2025, Ruben Wauters wrote:
>
> ... snip ...
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Thank you for highlighting this, I believe this is a good target for
>> cleanup, and I would be interested in any other scripts you have
>> that provide similar information.
>>
>> I am fairly new to linux kernel development in general, not having a
>> large amount of patches to my name, however, opportunities for
>> cleanup and janitorial work, while often neglected by other
>> programmers for larger features, still are important in my opinion,
>> as it creates a more maintainable and cleaner codebase, as such I
>> would be very much interested in any cleanup opportunities.
>
> I started documenting these potential cleanups here:
>
> https://crashcourse.ca/doku/doku.php?id=linux_kernel_cleanup
>
> so anyone who's interested can start processing whatever parts of the
> kernel source tree that interests them.

Hi Robert,

This is going to be very helpful to newcomers that are looking forward
to contributing to the Linux kernel.

Looking at your list, the tools are awesome and well-thought. But I
believe some guidelines can be put in-place for some, so folks can get
their patches upstream easily, and of course, have some confidence in
it.

One guideline that came to mind almost immediately is regarding the
tools "Calculating the length of an array" is that people should pick a
subsystem and send a patchset, i.e. do not send a massive change that
changes code under more than one Kernel subsystem.

This approach respects maintainer, and simplifies the review process.

--
C. Mitrodimas

>
> There will be more cleanup scripts coming over the next few days.
>
> rday