[RFC] Coding Style: Chain-includes, style questions not defined in the guide and cleanup patches

[Julius Werner]

Hi,

I recently landed a coding style change to define some rules about how
#include directives should be written and when it's okay to
"chain-include" a header, because this has been a frequent topic of
discussion and cleanup patches in the past year(s) and people seemed
to keep having different opinions about it. The patch caused a bit
more of a stir than I anticipated because not everyone saw it before
going in -- apologies for not circulating it more widely before. If
you are interested in the topic, please join the discussion on
https://review.coreboot.org/50247 and I'll try to write a fixup patch
for it once we can clarify some consensus (contention seems to be
mostly about whether headers should be alphabetized or not right now).

However, in the course of that we also got into a more general
discussion about "cleanup patches" and when it should be okay to write
them (because sometimes people try to "clean up" things that other
people intentionally wrote that way and that tends to cause some
contention). I've uploaded a new coding style change about this as
https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/50966 which is trying to
define some ground rules for this (and for how the style guide should
be applied in general). The gist of it is that I think "cleanup
patches" should focus on the things that are actually defined in the
coding style, and for the things that aren't we should generally aim
to honor the original author's intentions and not "bulk clean"
existing files. If there are things in existing files that we think
are worth cleaning up, we should first find some consensus about what
is wrong with them and put a rule about that in the coding style, so
that different people don't keep "cleaning up" the existing codebase
to their personal preferences which keeps pulling it in different
directions.

If you're interested in this topic please join the discussion on
Gerrit and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Julius