From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: inventsekar@gmail.com (inventsekar) Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 09:12:32 +0530 Subject: regarding const variables/structures In-Reply-To: <20180912070838.GA7684@osadl.at> References: <20180912070838.GA7684@osadl.at> Message-ID: To: kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org List-Id: kernelnewbies.lists.kernelnewbies.org >>> A brute force grep in the kernel shows that there are 130493 " const " in there Hi Hofrat, 1. may i know the command to do this above grep please.. 2. (and the opposite) may i know the command to grep other type of variables/structures thanks again.. your points and Greg's points are very clear. i was having this doubt from last Dec(from that tweet) and it got cleared. Happy Ganesh Chaturthi to All. ( Lord Ganesh is widely revered as the remover of obstacles,[9] the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom) On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 12:38 PM Nicholas Mc Guire wrote: > On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 11:50:35AM +0530, inventsekar wrote: > > Hi All... > > One curious question.. > > > > Linux Foundation tweeted this - > > Meet Bhumika Goyal, age 22, from India. She has had more 340 patches > > accepted into the Linux kernel, which helped her land one of our two > Linux > > Kernel Guru LiFT scholarships: > > https://twitter.com/linuxfoundation/status/940340927897489408?lang=en > > > > and her commits are - > > https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits?author=bhumikagoyal > > > > One of my friend told me that, most/many of patches are just converting > > variables to "*constant*" > > > > For example - platform/chrome: chromeos_laptop: make chromeos_laptop > const > > - > > > > Declare chromeos_laptop structures as *const *as they are only used > during > > a copy operation. As their value is never modified during runtime, they > > can be made const. > > > > > > the question is that, how these many const variable issues are > left/missed > > by the previous developers?!?! per my little knowledge, this task looks > > like a simple one.. many other Kernel Developers should have thought and > > made these changes long before, but i am not able to understand why this > > wasnt done until recently?!?!? > > > well (almost) all issues are simple once they are known, and in 16M LoC or > what ever the kernel currently is, it is not a big surprise to find a few > hundred issues of almost any bug-class. If you really want to know how bad > the problem is, or rather how much it says about the overall quality, you > would need to answer at least two questions. > 1) how many cases of const are missing > 2) how many cases of const are in use correctly > just counting how many are missing does not tell you much about how good or > bad kernel developers are. If 99% of the cases are handled correctly I > would > say thats good - but given the size of the kernel that would probably mean > that there still are quite a few that are not handled correctly. Further > you > would probably need to check how old the code was that that was fixed up. > > A brute force grep in the kernel shows that there are 130493 " const " in > ther (as of 4.18.2 in -stable) so if the developers got 340 wrong - I would > say thats not that scary after all the consequence of not having the const > in > there are quite benign. > > I think that it is often times not a mater of not seeing issues but it is a > matter of priority and available time - and what this case really does show > is that there are opportunities for people moving into kernel development > to get to work on simple problems to start with where they can get well > acquainted with the procedural issues first - I think that is a good > thing and may actually be important to allow new developers to join in. > > > thx! > hofrat > -- Best Regards, Sekar -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: