This page is designed to give you an idea of how to write linux-wireless patches.

Prior to sending patches

Please DO NOT PGP sign patches sent to linux-wireless. The reason is that signing patches will normalize the and use qp-encoding (Quoated Printable) for the patch. Quoted-Printable encoding replaces characters you can't have in 7-bit by =XX where XX is the hex code. As you can imagine applying such patches will simply not work. Also, please note that we prefer patches inline rather than attachments.

Who to address

If you intend on getting your patch committed address your e-mail as follows:

To: ''John Linville''
CC: ''linux-wireless'', Driver Maintainers

Where [http://linuxwireless.org/en/developers/maintainers Driver Maintainers] contains the list of maintianers for the driver you are patching.

Subject name

If what you are sending is a patch you can use a subject as follows:

[PATCH] driver_name: fix foo and optimize bar

If your patch is just a proposal you can use this format for your subject:

[RFC][PATCH] driver_name: a new way to do foo

Sending large patches or multiple patches

You should only send a large patch if your patch does one specific task, or a few of them if they are easy to review. If your work consists of multiple tasks you must split your tasks into separate patches. Each patch must address a small set of tasks to help the maintainers with revision. The rule of thumb here is if you read your patch and if its not clear what the patch is doing then better break it down into separate patches.

If you are sending multiple patches which depend on each other you can use this format for the subjects:

[PATCH 0/4] driver_name: introduce foo and bar
[PATCH 1/4] driver_name: introduce get_foo_bars()
[PATCH 2/4] driver_name: fix locking on bar_by_foo()
[PATCH 3/4] driver_name: use foo when barring
[PATCH 4/4] driver_name: optimize bar at init time

[PATCH 0/4] in this case would give a brief overview of all the changes, no patch should be included in that e-mail.

Format of patches

We prefer patches to be inline-text at the end of the body of the e-mail. You can use git-diff or the like to generate the patch. Additionally note that we prefer to apply patches with -p1. A header as follows is then acceptable:

diff --git a/include/net/mac80211.h b/include/net/mac80211.h
index 9b4b4a2..4832e6a 100644
--- a/include/net/mac80211.h
+++ b/include/net/mac80211.h

Signed-off-by, Acked-by

Quoting Andrew Morton:

'the Signed-off-by: tag implies that the signer was involved in the development of the patch, or that he/she was in the patch's delivery path. If a person was not directly involved in the preparation or handling of a patch but wishes to signify and record their approval of it then they can arrange to have an Acked-by: line added to the patch's changelog. – [http://kerneltrap.org/node/8329 From Kerneltrap, on Linux: Using Acked-by Tags]