Re: [GIT PULL] Kselftest update for Linux 5.4-rc1

Ingo Molnar
2019-09-22T11:26:02Z

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 9:35 AM Brendan Higgins
> <brendanhiggins@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry about that. I am surprised that none of the other reviewers
> > brought this up.
>
> I think I'm "special".
>
> There was some other similar change a few years ago, which I
> absolutely hated because of how it broke autocomplete for me. Very few
> other people seemed to react to it.

FWIW, I am obsessively sensitive to autocomplete and overall source code
file hieararchy and nomenclature details as well, so it's not just you.

Beyond the muscle memory aspect, nonsensical naming and inanely flat file
hierarchies annoy kernel developers and makes it harder for newbies to
understand the kernel source as well.

The less clutter, the more organization, the better - and there's very
few valid technical reasons to add any new files or directories to the
top level directory - we should probably *remove* quite a few.

For example 'firmware/' was recently moved to drivers/firmware/, and in a
similar fashion about a third of the remaining 22 directories should
probably be moved too:

drwxr-xr-x arch
drwxr-xr-x block
drwxr-xr-x certs # move to build/certs/ dir
drwxr-xr-x crypto # move to kernel/crypto/ or security/crypto/
drwxr-xr-x Documentation
drwxr-xr-x drivers
drwxr-xr-x fs
drwxr-xr-x include
drwxr-xr-x init
drwxr-xr-x ipc # move to kernel/ipc/
drwxr-xr-x kernel
drwxr-xr-x lib
drwxr-xr-x LICENSES
drwxr-xr-x mm
drwxr-xr-x net
drwxr-xr-x samples # move to Documentation/samples/
drwxr-xr-x scripts # move to build/scripts/
drwxr-xr-x security
drwxr-xr-x sound # move to drivers/sound/
drwxr-xr-x tools
drwxr-xr-x usr # move to build/usr/
drwxr-xr-x virt # move to the already existing drivers/virt/

-rw-r--r-- COPYING
-rw-r--r-- CREDITS
-rw-r--r-- Kbuild
-rw-r--r-- Kconfig
-rw-r--r-- MAINTAINERS
-rw-r--r-- Makefile
-rw-r--r-- README

There's a few borderline ones:

- 'block' could in principle move to drivers/block/core/ but it's fine
at the top level too I think.

- 'init' could in principle be moved to kernel/init/ - but it's not
wrong at the top level either.

The remaining top level hierarchy would look pretty sweet and short:

drwxr-xr-x arch
drwxr-xr-x block
drwxr-xr-x build # new
drwxr-xr-x Documentation
drwxr-xr-x drivers
drwxr-xr-x fs
drwxr-xr-x include
drwxr-xr-x init
drwxr-xr-x kernel
drwxr-xr-x lib
drwxr-xr-x LICENSES
drwxr-xr-x mm
drwxr-xr-x net
drwxr-xr-x security
drwxr-xr-x tools

-rw-r--r-- COPYING
-rw-r--r-- CREDITS
-rw-r--r-- Kbuild
-rw-r--r-- Kconfig
-rw-r--r-- MAINTAINERS
-rw-r--r-- Makefile
-rw-r--r-- README

I'm volunteering to do this (in a scripted, repeatable, reviewable,
tweakable and "easy to execute in a quiet moment" fashion), although
I also expect you to balk at the churn. :-)

Thanks,

Ingo