Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] m68k comments break patch submission due to being incorrectly formatted

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 04:30, Lucien Murray-Pitts
<lucienmp.qemu@gmail.com> wrote:
> checkpatch is correctly identifying the wrong style in the changed code.
> This changed code contains the original comments with ADDITIONAL edits
> resulting in pachew/checkpatch complaining.
>
> The m68k is, by my guess, older code and nearly all the comments are different
> from the style guide.  Some are "/**" or "/*commment here...." and so on.

Yeah. We have a fair bit of old-style code in the codebase. There
are two different approaches we take to this:
 (1) the most common is "fix the parts your patch is touching anyway"
(ie in a new-feature patch you make the minimum fixes to the surrounding
old code needed to keep checkpatch happy with it)
 (2) mass fix-up of old style stuff as a separate patch

Mostly we use (1) but this does have the downside that old style
can lurk in not-often-touched files for a long time. So if the
maintainer (in this case Laurent) is happy with a type (2) fix-up
that's good too. (Personally I used to be much more in favour
of sticking with approach 1 but my opinion has changed over
time as I've seen the downsides of it.)

thanks
-- PMM