Dear Joe Hershberger,
[..]
Yes please, make it mandatory. Otherwise people won't obey and the documentation will suffer ... and all this would be meaningless.
I think mandatory should only be for newly added functions.
Pardon my wording, this is what I had in mind.
There is already enough burden on touching existing code wrt checkpatch. The reviewer can feel free to recommend documentation if appropriate... possibly even drafting the docs.
+1
- If so, what does that mean for patches that touch existing code?
Ask the current custodian to annotate their code.
This seems like a nice approach to get pretty good coverage for areas that have maintainers... it won't help for most of the common things (unless you are suggesting that WD has an awful lot to document).
With the DM, I slowly started to claim this role :-(
If I change the major part of an existing function (without changing it's calling interface), am I obligued to add kernel-doc comments?
Yes. Even though major vs. minor change seems pretty vague, common sense shall be applied here.
And hence should not be mandatory to make the requirement criteria clear.
If I change the calling interface, must I add documentation then?
Of course, yes.
Agreed.
[...]
-Joe