Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:18:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: Andres Baldrich <andresbaldrich@ymail.com>
cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
       Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Yinghai Lu <yhlu.kernel@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] percpu fixes for 2.6.32-rc6
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On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Andres Baldrich wrote:
> 
> (Kernel)/Documentation/CodingStyle
> line 83:

A lot of people have added code to CodingStyle. That doesn't make it 
final. For example, that 80-column thing never existed in my original 
coding style, for a reason.

I'm really inclined to just remove the stupid thing entirely both from 
coding-style and from checkpatch.

80 columns do not matter. What matters is:
 - indentation
 - complex expressions and statements

and those two issues _together_ means that 80+ columns should be damn 
rare, but the 80 columns itself is not at all that important.

Much more important than 80 columns should be the general guideline that a 
"terminal window" may be as small as 80x24. But notice how 80 is just a 
small part of that limitation - the 24 is as important as the 80. We have 
a guideline that functions should fit on a screenful or two, ie we should 
generally aim for functions to be <50 lines long.

And the 80-column thing is EXACTLY THE SAME THING. We should remember that 
people may read the code using a roughly 80x24 screen size, but the same 
way that nobody sane thinks that "24" is some hard limit on number of 
lines, why do people suddenly think that "80" is a hard limit on the 
number of columns?

		Linus
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