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SubmittingPatches: document the use of git
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Most of the mechanical portions of SubmittingPatches exist to help patch
submitters replicate the output of git.  Mention this explicitly, both
as a reminder that git will help with this process, and as signposting
to let git users know what they can safely skip.

Signed-off-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Acked-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Josh Triplett authored and Linus Torvalds committed Apr 3, 2014
1 parent 9547c70 commit 8e3072a
Showing 1 changed file with 16 additions and 15 deletions.
31 changes: 16 additions & 15 deletions Documentation/SubmittingPatches
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@ Read Documentation/SubmitChecklist for a list of items to check
before submitting code. If you are submitting a driver, also read
Documentation/SubmittingDrivers.


Many of these steps describe the default behavior of the git version
control system; if you use git to prepare your patches, you'll find much
of the mechanical work done for you, though you'll still need to prepare
and document a sensible set of patches.

--------------------------------------------
SECTION 1 - CREATING AND SENDING YOUR CHANGE
Expand All @@ -25,7 +28,9 @@ SECTION 1 - CREATING AND SENDING YOUR CHANGE
1) "diff -up"
------------

Use "diff -up" or "diff -uprN" to create patches.
Use "diff -up" or "diff -uprN" to create patches. git generates patches
in this form by default; if you're using git, you can skip this section
entirely.

All changes to the Linux kernel occur in the form of patches, as
generated by diff(1). When creating your patch, make sure to create it
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -66,19 +71,14 @@ Make sure your patch does not include any extra files which do not
belong in a patch submission. Make sure to review your patch -after-
generated it with diff(1), to ensure accuracy.

If your changes produce a lot of deltas, you may want to look into
splitting them into individual patches which modify things in
logical stages. This will facilitate easier reviewing by other
kernel developers, very important if you want your patch accepted.
There are a number of scripts which can aid in this:

Quilt:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt
If your changes produce a lot of deltas, you need to split them into
individual patches which modify things in logical stages; see section
#3. This will facilitate easier reviewing by other kernel developers,
very important if you want your patch accepted.

Andrew Morton's patch scripts:
http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/stuff/patch-scripts.tar.gz
Instead of these scripts, quilt is the recommended patch management
tool (see above).
If you're using git, "git rebase -i" can help you with this process. If
you're not using git, quilt <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt>
is another popular alternative.



Expand Down Expand Up @@ -607,7 +607,8 @@ patch.
If you are going to include a diffstat after the "---" marker, please
use diffstat options "-p 1 -w 70" so that filenames are listed from
the top of the kernel source tree and don't use too much horizontal
space (easily fit in 80 columns, maybe with some indentation).
space (easily fit in 80 columns, maybe with some indentation). (git
generates appropriate diffstats by default.)

See more details on the proper patch format in the following
references.
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