linux-kernel - Re: checkpatch [was: include/asm-x86/serial.h: checkpatch cleanups

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Message-ID: <877ift8hre.fsf@basil.nowhere.org>
Date:	23 Mar 2008 18:36:21 +0100
From:	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>
To:	Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@...il.com>
Cc:	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, viro@...IV.linux.org.uk,
	joe@...ches.com, mingo@...e.hu, tglx@...utronix.de,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: checkpatch [was: include/asm-x86/serial.h: checkpatch cleanups - formatting only]

Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@...il.com> writes:
> 
> It just spits out warnings/errors like compiler or some static
> analyzer, maybe I'm terribly missing something, what exactly do you
> mind on the output?

A good example are the trailing white space warnings in there. They
are just useless and a waste of time. That is something that really
should just be done automatically by maintainer scripts somewhere on
merge (and a lot of maintainers do it automatically), not waste the
valuable time of a human.

There are also a couple of other pointless warnings. e.g. I dislike
some of the style warnings -- they are far too broad. Or there 
can be good reasons to violate them occasionally. e.g. I would
rather put not a space around an operator occasionally instead
of splitting an expression to avoid going over 80 characers. 
Or the EXPORT_SYMBOL warning. WTF is that good for? Or 
the warning about if () ... else { ... }.

Also checkpatch.pl --file seems to be a good candidate for one
of the worst ideas ever merged (to be fair it was difficult
to see it would become that bad in advance -- but it got) 

On the other hand a few of the pattern matches are ful.

To fix the worst problems of checkpatch.pl one could probably 
do something like this:
- Get rid of --file
- Drop at least 50% of the style warnings (or make them 
not trigger unless a special option is given) and review all
the others.
- Concentrate on the really useful things like checking
for deprecated functions and pattern matching for a few 
common mistakes.

-Andi
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