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From: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
To: Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org>, regressions@lists.linux.dev,
 stable@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>, Ben Hutchings
 <ben@decadent.org.uk>, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
 linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Aditya Srivastava
 <yashsri421@gmail.com>, 1064035@bugs.debian.org
Subject: Re: [regression 5.10.y] linux-doc builds: Global symbol "$args"
 requires explicit package name (did you forget to declare "my $args"?) at
 ./scripts/kernel-doc line 1236.
In-Reply-To: <ZeHKjjPGoyv_b2Tg@eldamar.lan>
References: <ZeHKjjPGoyv_b2Tg@eldamar.lan>
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2024 06:39:26 -0700
Message-ID: <877ciiw1yp.fsf@meer.lwn.net>
Precedence: bulk
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Salvatore Bonaccorso <carnil@debian.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Ben Hutchings reported in https://bugs.debian.org/1064035 a problem
> with the kernel-doc builds once 3080ea5553cc ("stddef: Introduce
> DECLARE_FLEX_ARRAY() helper") got applied in 5.10.210 (as
> prerequisite of another fix in 5.10.y):
>
>> The backport of commit 3080ea5553cc "stddef: Introduce
>> DECLARE_FLEX_ARRAY() helper" modified scripts/kernel-doc and
>> introduced a syntax error:
>> 
>> Global symbol "$args" requires explicit package name (did you forget to declare "my $args"?) at ./scripts/kernel-doc line 1236.
>> Global symbol "$args" requires explicit package name (did you forget to declare "my $args"?) at ./scripts/kernel-doc line 1236.
>> Execution of ./scripts/kernel-doc aborted due to compilation errors.
>> 
>> This doesn't stop the documentation build process, but causes the
>> documentation that should be extracted by kernel-doc to be missing
>> from linux-doc-5.10.
>> 
>> We should be able to fix this by eithering backport commit
>> e86bdb24375a "scripts: kernel-doc: reduce repeated regex expressions
>> into variables" or replacing /$args/ with /([^,)]+)/.
>> 
>> Ben.
>
> What would be prefered here from stable maintainers point of view?
> AFAICS e86bdb24375a ("scripts: kernel-doc: reduce repeated regex
> expressions into variables") won't apply cleanly and needs some
> refactoring. The alternative pointed out by Ben would be to replace
> the /$args/ with  /([^,)]+)/.

Hmm...this is the first I see of any of this...

The latter fix seems like the more straightforward of the two.  The only
concern might be if there are other kernel-doc backports that might run
afoul of the same problem, hopefully not.

But this makes me wonder if there are other stable kernels that are
affected as well.  I guess that, despite all of the testing being done
on stable updates, nobody is testing the docs build?

Thanks,

jon