add a trivial patch style checker

We are seeing increasing levels of minor patch style violations in submissions
to the mailing lists as well as making it into the tree.  These detract from
the quality of the submission and cause unnessary work for reviewers.

As a first step package up the current state of the patch style checker and
include it in the kernel tree.  Add instructions suggesting running it on
submissions.  This adds version v0.01 of the checkpatch.pl script.

Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Joel Schopp <jschopp@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@codemonkey.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
index 4cc17b993b6a..61a970823a6e 100644
--- a/MAINTAINERS
+++ b/MAINTAINERS
@@ -30,8 +30,11 @@ trivial patch so apply some common sense.
         job the maintainers (and especially Linus) do is to keep things
         looking the same. Sometimes this means that the clever hack in
         your driver to get around a problem actually needs to become a
-        generalized kernel feature ready for next time. See
-        Documentation/CodingStyle for guidance here.
+        generalized kernel feature ready for next time.
+
+        PLEASE check your patch with the automated style checker
+        (scripts/checkpatch.pl) to catch trival style violations.
+        See Documentation/CodingStyle for guidance here.
 
         PLEASE try to include any credit lines you want added with the
         patch. It avoids people being missed off by mistake and makes
@@ -972,6 +975,15 @@ M:	johannes@sipsolutions.net
 L:      linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
 S:      Maintained
 
+CHECKPATCH
+P:      Andy Whitcroft
+M:      apw@shadowen.org
+P:      Randy Dunlap
+M:      rdunlap@xenotime.net
+P:      Joel Schopp
+M:      jschopp@austin.ibm.com
+S:      Supported
+
 COMMON INTERNET FILE SYSTEM (CIFS)
 P:      Steve French
 M:      sfrench@samba.org