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Subject: Re: [PATCH linux-kselftest/test v6] lib/list-test: add a test for the
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To:     Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>,
        Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
Cc:     David Gow <davidgow@google.com>,
        Brendan Higgins <brendanhiggins@google.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
        "open list:KERNEL SELFTEST FRAMEWORK" 
        <linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org>, kunit-dev@googlegroups.com,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, shuah <shuah@kernel.org>
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From:   shuah <shuah@kernel.org>
Message-ID: <a127aeaa-e5ba-2d8d-0894-936e05637508@kernel.org>
Date:   Fri, 1 Nov 2019 10:49:51 -0600
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On 10/30/19 1:23 PM, Joe Perches wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-10-30 at 22:12 +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 10:27:12AM -0600, shuah wrote:
>>>> It's better to ignore checkpatch and other scripts when they are wrong.
>>>> (unless the warning message inspires you to make the code more readable
>>>> for humans).
>>>>
>>>
>>> It gets confusing when to ignore and when not to. It takes work to
>>> figure out and it is subjective.
>>>
>>
>> In this case, it's not subjective because checkpatch is clearly not
>> working as intended.
> 
> checkpatch _is_ working as intended.
> It was never intended to be perfect.
> 
> checkpatch _always_ depended on a reviewer deciding
> whether its output was appropriate.
> 
>> I don't feel like "checkpatch clean" is a useful criteria for applying
>> patches.
> 
> Nor do I.
> 
>> The other things about warnings is that I always encourage people to
>> just ignore old warnings.  If you're running Smatch and you see a
>> warning in ancient code that means I saw it five years ago and didn't
>> fix it so it's a false positive.  Old warnings are always 100% false
>> positives.
> 
> That'd be not absolute either because it depended on your
> historical judgment as to whether an old warning was in fact
> a defect or not.
> 
> People make mistakes.
> Regex based scripts are by design stupid and untrustworthy.
> 
> Mistakes will be made.
> Just fix the actual defects in code as soon as possible.
> 
> 
> 


Thanks all for chiming in. I am taking v6 as is and adding an update
to commit log capture the spurious errors from checkpath.pl for this
specific case.

thanks,
-- Shuah