Re: [RFC] Maintainer entry profile/contributor guide for IIO

On Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:31:45 -0500
David Lechner <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 8/17/26 4:18 AM, Joshua Crofts wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I was browsing lore and checked out the ksummit mailing list, where the
> > topic about guiding new contributors arose [1]. New contributors tend to
> > make the same mistakes when sending patches, causing reviewers to point
> > these out all the time over and over again. For IIO, this is definitely the
> > case (I myself send an email telling people not to send a v2 in reply to a
> > v1 several times a week). Other subsystems have a "Maintainer entry profile"
> > that contains subsystem-specific process info (DAMON for example [2]) and 
> > (sometimes even [3]) a document describing the code style of the subsystem
> > (this would be a great place where to mention things like not using
> > kernel.h in new drivers etc.). I'm happy to create both of the documents
> > but it's always great to hear other people's ideas!   
> 
> I think there are plenty of new contributor (to the kernel) guides out there.
> People just don't read them. So I don't think we need another. Nothing wrong
> with trying to make the existing guides more clear/easy to understand though.
> 
> A subsystem doc that has our code style quirks and idioms would be helpful
> though as I don't think that has every been written down in a single place.
> Especially useful now since AI reviewers will read it even if humans don't.

Yes, but it shouldn't be limited to code style quirks - I highly doubt new
contributors develop against the togreg tree of iio.git for example.

I'd propose 2 documents:
- entry profile - documenting the review cycle, patchwork, point people over to
  Sashiko, relevant git tree etc.
- code style - the TODO is fine for existing problems in the subsystem but doesn't
  point out idioms we have in IIO, i.e. not using (the awful) kernel.h, preferring
  devm_* functions, not failing on a mismatched ID to ensure fallback etc. This is
  stuff that appears a lot in patches.

Whether new contributors read these is up to them (from my experience if you write
decent docs people still won't read them and ask pointless questions), nevertheless
if we suspect someone is new we can just point them to these documents instead of
reiterating the same over and over again.

-- 
Kind regards,
Joshua Crofts