Return-path: Received: from mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr ([192.134.164.83]:10934 "EHLO mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750720Ab3LaGcw (ORCPT ); Tue, 31 Dec 2013 01:32:52 -0500 Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 07:32:46 +0100 (CET) From: Julia Lawall To: Joe Perches cc: Johannes Berg , Henrique de Moraes Holschuh , Julia Lawall , kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org, Emmanuel Grumbach , Intel Linux Wireless , "John W. Linville" , linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/11] use ether_addr_equal_64bits In-Reply-To: <1388445422.26796.38.camel@joe-AO722> Message-ID: (sfid-20131231_073348_539182_CCA87BE1) References: <1388427307-8691-1-git-send-email-Julia.Lawall@lip6.fr> <1388427307-8691-5-git-send-email-Julia.Lawall@lip6.fr> <1388429761.4410.1.camel@jlt4.sipsolutions.net> <1388438724.4573.2.camel@jlt4.sipsolutions.net> <20131230215701.GA4938@khazad-dum.debian.net> <1388445188.18164.0.camel@jlt4.sipsolutions.net> <1388445422.26796.38.camel@joe-AO722> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: > > > > I'm just thinking of a programmer, e.g. changing a struct like this: > > > > > > > > struct foo { > > > > u8 addr[ETH_ALEN]; > > > > - u16 dummy; > > > > }; > > I don't know of a way to catch that. > Anyone else? Well, one could have a semantic patch that checks for that. But the problem is that it is very slow, and it only covers the cases that I can transform automatically, which currently means no pointers, only explicit arrays. On the other hand, I am finding the structure definition, so I can easily update the structure definition with an appropriate comment. struct foo { u8 addr[ETH_ALEN]; /* must be followed by two bytes in the structure */ u16 dummy; }; Unfortunately it is kind of verbose. Could there be an attribute? That could even easily be checked. julia