[coreboot] How to reduce formal issues with new contributions from corporations?

[Julius Werner]

I don't think it's helpful to single out "corporate developers" as the
black sheep that submit all the style violations. Every contributor, paid
or hobby, new or long-time, needs to pay attention to the project
guidelines equally. Everyone overlooks stuff some time, and it's normal
especially for new contributors to not be quite that familiar with
everything yet. Its our responsibility as reviewers (especially those of us
with +2 rights) to educate them and make sure the rules are followed before
a patch can get submitted.

That said, I do agree that we have a lot of potential in making this easier
and more consistent for everyone involved. I think the best tool for that
is more automated checking... like that recent idea to make Jenkins add the
checkpatch result visibly to its Verified+1 message.

I'm not sure if the "where" of the guidelines really makes much of a
difference... maybe we should just make them more discoverable either way?
Could we put a big orange "please ensure that this patch conforms to the
style guidelines at ..." banner in Gerrit somewhere near the submit button?

I also think that our guidelines could use a lot of cleaning up,
honestly... it's a big mess right now, and the harder they are to read the
easier it gets to accidentally or intentionally ignore them. Right now we
have https://www.coreboot.org/Development_Guidelines which includes a lot
of stuff duplicated from https://www.coreboot.org/Coding_Style. The latter
is almost a direct but not quite copy of the Linux Kernel Style Guide (to
the point of still including a bunch of stuff that makes no sense for
coreboot, like the net/ and drivers/net/ commenting exception), so it's
easy for people to take a quick look, think "oh, it's only a copy of this
thing I know already" and miss the subtle differences. I think it might
make more sense to cut that page and rewrite Development_Guidelines to say
"coreboot code must confirm to the Linux Kernel Style Guide <upstream link>
with the following exceptions/additions". And then we also have
Documentation/gerrit_guidelines.md in the source which is yet again a
different, slightly overlapping set of rules that should probably get
merged into the main guide.
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