Re: [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Increase the line length limit from 80 to 100 colums

Jan Engelhardt
2012-02-09T21:55:49Z

On Friday 2012-02-03 11:07, Ingo Molnar wrote:

>[PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Increase the line length limit from 80 to 100 colums
>
>As far as I'm aware I was the last regular kernel contributor who
>still used a standard VGA text console, but both text (100 cols is
>also arguably closer to various brain limits such as vision of field
>and resolution restrictions

Please, no.

(Corollary 1) The older you get, the larger you like your glyphs to
be (...and the FOV is likely to lower as well).

14pt and up usually. And there is not a whole lot that fit on
10.1-inch netbook screens that way.

(Corollary 2) Travelers desire minimizing size and weight.

-----

As for checkpatch, I am throwing in the suggestion to augment checkpatch
such that it does not look at whether single lines are over $limit, but
whether a certain percentage of lines of a file is over $limit. That,
together with a badness value that is e.g. following some power law to
the amount of chars too much, but not when the line cannot be broken
in the first place. Maybe along the lines of

#perlish#
foreach (<>) {
/^\s+\S+/;
if (length($_) > length($&)) {
push @candidate, $_;
$badness += (length($_) - length($&)) ** 1.5;
}
}
if ($badness > $threshold) {
warn about @candidate_lines;
}