-----Original Message----- From: Ingo Molnar on Sunday, September 22, 2019 1:26 AM
- Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org wrote:
On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 9:35 AM Brendan Higgins brendanhiggins@google.com wrote:
Sorry about that. I am surprised that none of the other reviewers brought this up.
I think I'm "special".
There was some other similar change a few years ago, which I absolutely hated because of how it broke autocomplete for me. Very few other people seemed to react to it.
FWIW, I am obsessively sensitive to autocomplete and overall source code file hieararchy and nomenclature details as well, so it's not just you.
Beyond the muscle memory aspect, nonsensical naming and inanely flat file hierarchies annoy kernel developers and makes it harder for newbies to understand the kernel source as well.
The less clutter, the more organization, the better - and there's very few valid technical reasons to add any new files or directories to the top level directory - we should probably *remove* quite a few.
For example 'firmware/' was recently moved to drivers/firmware/, and in a similar fashion about a third of the remaining 22 directories should probably be moved too:
drwxr-xr-x arch drwxr-xr-x block drwxr-xr-x certs # move to build/certs/ dir drwxr-xr-x crypto # move to kernel/crypto/ or security/crypto/ drwxr-xr-x Documentation drwxr-xr-x drivers drwxr-xr-x fs drwxr-xr-x include drwxr-xr-x init drwxr-xr-x ipc # move to kernel/ipc/ drwxr-xr-x kernel drwxr-xr-x lib drwxr-xr-x LICENSES drwxr-xr-x mm drwxr-xr-x net drwxr-xr-x samples # move to Documentation/samples/ drwxr-xr-x scripts # move to build/scripts/
This one seems like it would break a lot of workflows, and contributor muscle memory and scripts. get_maintainer.pl and checkpatch.pl are probably in quite a few people's scripts.
Also, I'm not sure '/build' is the right destination for this. There are a lot more things in there than just build scripts. If you really want to remove the top level 'scripts', it might be best to put the scripts from top-level '/scripts' into '/tools/scripts', which is mostly empty now. -- Tim
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