Thank you so much for your detailed response. I appreciate the effort you put in answering to me. I will follow your guidelines and tips and hopefully submit patch worth merging. ________________________________ From: Valdis Kletnieks on behalf of Valdis Klçtnieks Sent: Monday, September 2, 2019 8:33:55 PM To: XenoN. w0w Cc: kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org Subject: Re: checkpatch.pl CHECK alignment On Mon, 02 Sep 2019 16:17:00 -0000, "XenoN. w0w" said: > Hello all, I am running checkpath.pl against one driver and I’m getting > CHECK: Alignment should match open parenthesis > Are these lines worth of changing, what are the odds of that patch being > accepted. I’m new and I want to contribute so sorry for dumb question Digression: If you want to contribute, you should probably first read this: https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/2017-April/017765.html Depends where in the kernel tree it is. If it's not under drivers/staging, a lot of maintainers won't take the patch for several reasons: 1) Most of the kernel tree is actually pretty stable and not being worked on, and there's always a non-zero chance of a fix-the-formatting patch being bad and changing semantics. It's rare but does happen. 2) Parts of the kernel are being actively worked on, and formatting patches can introduce merge conflicts, which usually make maintainers cranky. 3) And long-term, it messes up the output of 'git blame' - rather than showing you the commit that changed a function call from 3 parameters to 4, now it shows the commit that moved some spaces around. This tends to make developers cranky. If it *is* under drivers/staging, the patch will probably be accepted. However, the fact that it's under drivers/staging means there's probably several metric tons of stuff that needs fixing, and alignment of continued lines is the least of its problems. (Just for the record, the exfat patch *was* both sparse and checkpatch clean except for line-too-long warnings, and look at the long list of stuff I still need to fix :) Digression 2: From: "XenoN. w0w" That's not going to get accepted on a patch - see section 11 of Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst