[dpdk-dev] tools brainstorming

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>]

Hi,

As you probably know, a MAINTAINERS file is being filled, which is a great
help to request patch reviews and discuss design with the knowledgeable people
of this young DPDK community:
	http://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk/tree/MAINTAINERS

The next step is to clearly define what are the guidelines to review a patch
and accept it. So let's write a new document CONTRIBUTING (or another
capitalized file ;). It will help contributors to do the right checks
before submitting, and will help reviewers.

As we are lazy developers, writing guidelines is not enough. It must be
coupled with the integration of some tools. Let's work on these ones:
	- make autotests easier and faster to run for smoke testing
	- automated basic testpmd check
	- build check with various options combinations
	- abi check (started with validate-abi.sh)
	- static analyze (clang, free online coverity)
	- comment check (doxygen, codespell, kerspell)
	- format check (customized checkpatch)

I'm sure this last item will trigger a lot of debate.
Actually, format checking can be of two kinds:
	- commit message formatting (how to write the title, how and when adding
	Fixes tag, Signed-off-by tag, etc);
	- coding style might deserve its own document.

At the end, we should be able to pass a "make check" on the whole code and
a "make checkpatch" before submitting.
Then the result of these tools could be automatically checked and displayed
in patchwork or in an adapted version of qemu's patchew. But this is
obviously a later step.
When all automatic lights are green and human design review is properly done,
the patch can be acknowledged by one or many reviewers. Speaking about that,
it would be helpful to have a column in our patchwork to summarize the counts
of tests, reviews and acknowledgements.

Comments and contributions are more than welcome!