Re: Write and Submit Your First Kernel Patch

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