Re: orinoco_cs & IrDA

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Wed, 25 Apr 2001 14:31:30 -0700 (PDT)


On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Jean Tourrilhes wrote:
>
> I've got a question... I would like where to send my driver
> patches...

Probably both me and Alan.

[ General rules follow. Too few people seem to have seen them before ]

Most importantly, when sending patches to me:

- specify clearly that you really want to see them in the standard
kernel, and why. I occasionally get patches that just say "this is a
good idea". I don't apply them. Especially if they are cc'd to somebody
else too, in which case I pretty much assume that it's a RFC, not a
"real patch".

- do NOT send patches in attachements. Send one patch per mail, in
clear-text under your message, so that I can easily see the patch and
decide then-and-there whether it looks ok. And if it doesn't look ok,
and I do a "reply", the patch gets included in the reply so that I can
point out which part of the patch I dislike.

Don't worry about sending me five emails. That's FINE. I much prefer
seeing five consecutive emails from the same person with five distinct
subject lines and five distinct patches, than seeing one email with
five attachements to it.

- if your email system is broken, and you want to send patches as
attachements to avoid whitspace damage, then please FIX YOUR EMAIL
SYSTEM INSTEAD.

- Don't point to web-sites. If I have to move the mouse outside my email
xterm to work on the email, your email just got ignored.

- Make your patches one sub-directory under the source tree you're
working on. In short, your patches should look like something like

--- clean/fs/inode.c ...
+++ linux/fs/inode.c ..
@@ -179,7 +179,7 @@
...

so that I can (regardless of where my source tree is) apply them
with "patch -p1" from my linux top directory. Then I can just do a

cd v2.4/linux
patch -p1 < ~/multiple-emails-with-multiple-accepted-patches

and not have to worry about three patches being based on
/usr/src/linux, while two others not having a path at all and being
individual filenames in linux/drivers/net.

- and finally: re-send. If I had laser-eye surgery the fay you sent the
patches, I won't have applied them. If I took a day off and spent it
with the kids at the pool instead, I won't have applied them. If I
decided that this weekend I'm not going to read email for a change, I
won't have applied them.

And when I come back to work a day or two later, I will have several
hundred other emails to work through. I never go backwards in my
emails.

-
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