faq and tips

Hi.

Maybe this will be useful to somebody.
Comments, updates, fixes?

Kernel Janitors FAQ

Q: What is Kernel Janitors?
A: It is a project to help wannabe kernel hackers get their feet wet
while doing something useful for the community.

Q: What will I be doing?
A: Basically, cleaning up the kernel.
You can look at TODO for some example tasks.

Q: Prerequisites?
A: Knowledge of C, being able to compile and boot Linux kernel.

Q: What documents should i read?
A: SubmittingPatches, CodingStyle from Documentation/ .
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/tpp.txt
and http://linux.yyz.us/patch-format.html are good to read also.

Q: Where should I send patches to?
A: Mailing list: [email protected]
If you feel confident enough, you can CC: someone from MAINTAINERS too.

Q: Where can I find janitors?
A: On our mailing list and #kerneljanitor at irc.oftc.net

Q: I got some negative replies. Am I just wasting peoples' time?
A: A nice motivational post from Linus: http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255

Mailer problems
---------------
Q: What is prefered way of sending patches?
A: Inline (Insert file or similar, copy & paste is _not_ ok).
If that's not possible, plain text attachment (no base64, quoted string or, tux forbid, html).

Q: What do I need to set in my e-mail client?
A: Disable line wrap, and see upper FAQ.

Q: How do I test my settings are ok?
A: Send patch to yourself, save it, try applying it. If it works it's ok.

Some tips
---------
Use cscope or ctags for finding functions.
ketchup [1] is very useful for keeping up to date kernels.
Also for managing lots of patches you might find patch-scripts[2] or quilt[3] useful.
[1] http://www.selenic.com/ketchup/
[2] http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/patch-scripts-0.18/
[3] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt

When diffing more files (especially in different directories), linked trees (cp -al) are useful as they will work much faster; patch already knows that is should break hardlinks; vim can be taught by setting "set backupcopy=auto,breakhardlink" in your ~/.vimrc .
Example usage:
ketchup 2.6.12
cp -al linux-2.6.12 mytree

  # change some random files in mytree/
  diff -pruNX Documentation/dontdiff linux-2.6.12 mytree > my_new_patch

Since typing Signed-off-by gets boring, here's a ~/.vimrc sample:
map <F1> ^iSigned-off-by: Random C Developer <[email protected]><CR><ESC>^ map! <F1> Signed-off-by: Random C Developer <[email protected]><CR>

Trailing whitespace:
After you put this in ~/.vimrc it will be hard to not fix it:
highlight WhitespaceEOL ctermbg=red guibg=red match WhitespaceEOL /\s\+$/

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