On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 08:40:59AM -0700, Mark Salyzyn wrote:

On 10/23/19 4:56 AM, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 02:41:45PM -0700, Mark Salyzyn wrote:

quoted

Replace all occurrences of prefered with preferred to make future
checkpatch.pl's happy.  A few places the incorrect spelling is
matched with the correct spelling to preserve existing user space API.

Signed-off-by: Mark Salyzyn <redacted>

I'd fix such things when the code is otherwise change and scope this
patch only to Documentation/. There is no pragmatic benefit of doing
this for the code.

/Jarkko

The pragmatic benefit comes with the use of an ABI/API checker (which is a
'distro' thing, not a top of tree kernel thing) produces its map which is
typically required to be co-located in the same tree as the kernel
repository. Quite a few ABI/API update checkins result in a checkpatch.pl
complaint about the misspelled elements being (re-)recorded due to
proximity. We have a separate task to improve how it is tracked in Android
to reduce milepost marker changes that result in sweeping changes to the
database which would reduce the occurrences.

I will split this between pure and inert documentation/comments for now,
with a followup later for the code portion which understandably is more
controversial.

Cleanup is the least appreciated part of kernel maintenance ;-}.

Sincerely -- Mark Salyzyn

I'm a strong believer of "evolutionary" approach. Patch sets for the
most part (everything in the end has to be considered case by case, not
a strict rule) should have some functional changes involved.

What I do require for the parts that I maintain is that any new change
will result cleaner code base than the one that existed before that
change was applied. Again, there are some exceptions to this e.g.
circulating a firmware bug but this is my driving guideline as a
maintainer.

Doing cleanups just for cleanups can sometimes add unnecessary merge
conflicts when backporting patches to stable kernels. Thus, if you are
doing just a cleanup you should have extremely good reasons to do so.

/Jarkko