Subject: Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: Test for kmalloc/memset(0) pairs
From: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
To: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110319193954.GA2032@redhat.com>
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	 <20110317211548.646b04d2@tpl.lwn.net>  <20110319193954.GA2032@redhat.com>
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Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:26:20 -0400
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On Sat, 2011-03-19 at 15:39 -0400, Dave Jones wrote:

> Something that has crossed my mind over the last few days was the idea
> of splitting checkpatch into two tools.
> One for checking CodingStyle issues, and one for checking for actual
> code problems like the memset example.
> 
> The motivation for such is that I think it's pretty clear that many maintainers
> never run checkpatch on patches they queue up before pushing to Linus...
> 
> $ scripts/checkpatch.pl  ~/Mail/upstream/2.6.39/head-March-18-2011 | wc -l
> 2361
> 

I run it on all my patches. But there are some warnings that I ignore.
Sometimes I don't split the 80char lines if doing so makes the code even
uglier.


> The bulk of this is all "missing space here" "don't put a space there" type
> fluff that most maintainers just don't care about.  Any valuable warnings
> are lost in the noise.  If we had a separate tool to check for real flaws,
> (or even a way to suppress the stylistic warnings from the existing one)
> maybe more maintainers would run their changes through it.

As I replied with my phone, having a suppress warnings would be nice.

checkpatch -e patch

where -e is errors only?

> 
> I dunno, maybe I'm just a crazy dreamer too, but I think many people
> have written checkpatch off as useless in its current incarnation.

Well I and I'm sure Ingo use it quite a bit. I'm sure there are others
that do too.

I would really like to disable warnings, as the patches to my magic
macros break all sorts of checkpatch formatting rules, but real errors
may still exist. And because of that, I seldom use checkpatch on patches
that modify those macros.

Note, I've even found myself running checkpatch on non Linux code too ;)

-- Steve


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