Development: How to submit patches

Transition in maintainership

On the 8th of March 2005, Gerd Knorr announced that he was stepping down as the maintainer of the video4linux subsystem of the linux kernel. Gerd was responsible for coding a major part of the low-level drivers, his site at http://bytesex.org had been the hub of v4l development, and he had long served as the main quality assurance and relay for patches on the way to the kernel. In the mad scramble to come up with a workable development model, Johannes Stezenbach arranged for the development tree to be hosted at the LinuxTV.org site, and several developers stepped up to maintain the new CVS archive there. By 10 June 2005, Mauro Carvalho Chehab made the following announcement:

Video4linux snapshots available from linuxtv.org

We are now publishing periodic snapshots (about once a month) at linuxtv.org. The main idea is to have "stable" snapshots on Linuxtv. You can check it at:

http://www.linuxtv.org/downloads/video4linux/

The ChangeLog is also maintained at linuxtv.org. Our intention is to have one snapshot generated at the same time it is being submited to -mm series.

I intend to send a first series of synchronizing patches to -mm this weekend. There is already a working first patch at the site.

Mauro

Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab at brturbo dot com dot br>

The new development model

The new development model is now in place. While there is still no official maintainer of the video4linux subsystem of the linux kernel, a reliable procedure is in place for doing quality assurance, collecting patches, and submitting them to the linux kernel.

• The cvs tree at cvs.linuxtv.org is now the master copy of the video4linux subsystem

• Patches should be created against video4linux cvs

• Cf. instructions on How to build from CVS

• For references about how to develop a driver, take a look at Index of Documentation for People Interested in Writing and/or Understanding the Linux Kernel

How to get your changes into the mainline tree

1. Post your patches to the video4linux mailing list for review and testing by other people
2. Follow the guidelines in Documentation/SubmittingPatches (cf. jgarzik's version), including
   1. Send the patch inline, not as an attachment
   2. Use [PATCH] in the subject line to make it easy to spot
   3. Explain what the patch does and what hardware it applies to
   4. Document your work where appropriate, in the form of patches to Documentation/video4linux files
   5. Add a Signed-off-by: Your name <name@yoursite.com> as a Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
3. Fix any problems and repeat until everyone is happy ;)
4. The V4L Maintainer will periodically submit changes to mainstream, mailing it to the following:
   1. Linux kernel mailing list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
   2. Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> (the maintainer of the -mm tree)
   3. V4l mailing list