A few weeks ago I sent a spelling fix to the Linux kernel, mainly just to try out the patch submission workflow but also because I get mildly annoyed by spelling errors until I have the overwhelming urge to just send a patch. Here’s the cliffnotes of the process.
- Do your edits in the kernel tree of your choice. Before commiting anything, check out how the maintainers write commit messages with
git log. - When it comes to commiting the changes, you need to add the -s at the end to do the signoff.
#git commit <files> -s - Generate the (single) patch using:
# git format-patch HEAD~ - Check the patch for things that could make us get yelled at on the list:
# ./scripts/checkpatch.pl <patch filename> - Find out who exactly you need to send the patch to with the ✨magic✨ get_maintainer.pl script:
# ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl <patch filename> - Fire off the email and hopefully it all goes well:
# git send-email <patch filename>
And that’s it! My last patch submission was over 10 years ago, and for some reason I remember this was a lot harder to do back then.