From e5880f95a97928308845dc97fdd239605e06e501 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jakub Kicinski Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2025 13:42:57 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] docs: process: discourage pointless boilerplate kdoc It appears that folks "less versed in kernel coding" think that its good style to document every function, even if they have no useful information to pass to the future readers of the code. This used to be just a waste of space, but with increased kdoc format linting it's also a burden when refactoring the code. Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski Reviewed-by: Joe Damato Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250614204258.61449-1-kuba@kernel.org --- Documentation/process/coding-style.rst | 5 ++++- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst b/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst index 19d2ed47ff79..d1a8e5465ed9 100644 --- a/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst +++ b/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst @@ -614,7 +614,10 @@ it. When commenting the kernel API functions, please use the kernel-doc format. See the files at :ref:`Documentation/doc-guide/ ` and -``scripts/kernel-doc`` for details. +``scripts/kernel-doc`` for details. Note that the danger of over-commenting +applies to kernel-doc comments all the same. Do not add boilerplate +kernel-doc which simply reiterates what's obvious from the signature +of the function. The preferred style for long (multi-line) comments is: -- 2.25.1