Re: [RFC] MAINTAINERS tag for cleanup robot

[Tom Rix <trix@redhat.com>]

On 11/22/20 6:56 AM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 06:46:46AM -0800, Tom Rix wrote:
>> On 11/21/20 7:23 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>> On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 08:50:58AM -0800, trix@redhat.com wrote:
>>>> The fixer review is
>>>> https://reviews.llvm.org/D91789
>>>>
>>>> A run over allyesconfig for x86_64 finds 62 issues, 5 are false positives.
>>>> The false positives are caused by macros passed to other macros and by
>>>> some macro expansions that did not have an extra semicolon.
>>>>
>>>> This cleans up about 1,000 of the current 10,000 -Wextra-semi-stmt
>>>> warnings in linux-next.
>>> Are any of them not false-positives?  It's all very well to enable
>>> stricter warnings, but if they don't fix any bugs, they're just churn.
>>>
>> While enabling additional warnings may be a side effect of this effort
>>
>> the primary goal is to set up a cleaning robot. After that a refactoring robot.
> Why do we need such a thing?  Again, it sounds like more churn.
> It's really annoying when I'm working on something important that gets
> derailed by pointless churn.  Churn also makes it harder to backport
> patches to earlier kernels.
>
A refactoring example on moving to treewide, consistent use of a new api may help.

Consider

2efc459d06f1630001e3984854848a5647086232

sysfs: Add sysfs_emit and sysfs_emit_at to format sysfs output

A new api for printing in the sysfs.  How do we use it treewide ?

Done manually, it would be a heroic effort requiring high level maintainers pushing and likely only get partially done.

If a refactoring programatic fixit is done and validated on a one subsystem, it can run on all the subsystems.

The effort is a couple of weeks to write and validate the fixer, hours to run over the tree.

It won't be perfect but will be better than doing it manually.

Tom