Re: Write and Submit Your First Kernel Patch

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Kevyn-Alexandre Paré wrote:

Hi,

Just before I send my patch I got this error with:
./scripts/checkpatch.pl --terse --file
0001-Staging-comedi-driver-fix-coding-style.patch

You're using checkpatch --file on a patch. I hope you don't intend your 
patch to be added to the kernel source as a file, but rather applied to 
the kernel source, changing other files. (I bet "gcc 0001-Staging*.patch" 
will get interesting errors, too...) The patch format adds a single 
character at the beginning of each line to say whether it's a addition, a 
deletion, or a context line, and the context lines are identified by a 
space character. This means that a blank context line consists of just 
this space character, which is therefore a trailing space. We get the same 
type of complaints when we have expected diff output in our test scripts.

I'm kind of surprised that checkpatch doesn't completely blow up when it's 
expecting a source file and getting a patch (and maybe tell you what 
you've done). But that's the source of your errors, anyway.

	-Daniel
*This .sig left intentionally blank*