CodingStyle: relax the 80-cole rule

I would suggest this change to make CodingStyle properly reflect the style
used by the kernel, rather than the current wording which is wishful
thinking and misleading, and comes from the same school of thought that
gets off on prescriptive grammar, latin and comp.std.c

Signed-off-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/Documentation/CodingStyle b/Documentation/CodingStyle
index 7f1730f..6caa146 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/CodingStyle
+++ b/Documentation/CodingStyle
@@ -77,12 +77,15 @@ Get a decent editor and don't leave whitespace at the end of lines.
 Coding style is all about readability and maintainability using commonly
 available tools.
 
-The limit on the length of lines is 80 columns and this is a hard limit.
+The limit on the length of lines is 80 columns and this is a strongly
+preferred limit.
 
 Statements longer than 80 columns will be broken into sensible chunks.
 Descendants are always substantially shorter than the parent and are placed
 substantially to the right. The same applies to function headers with a long
-argument list. Long strings are as well broken into shorter strings.
+argument list. Long strings are as well broken into shorter strings. The
+only exception to this is where exceeding 80 columns significantly increases
+readability and does not hide information.
 
 void fun(int a, int b, int c)
 {