Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: Test for kmalloc/memset(0) pairs

[Borislav Petkov <bp@amd64.org>]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 09:26:20AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 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.

Same here, certain warnings checkpatch spits are plain dumb in certain
situations. What we want is to fix checkpatch to warn/error out only
on real issues which are valid 100% of the cases and stick all the
remaining, not-always-an-issue stuff which deserves a warning only
sometimes behind a "--pedantic" or "--extended-checks" option or
whatever.

> > 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?

Yeah, let's enable the errors-only checking by default, i.e. no args and if you
want additional ones, you need to switch on an option.

> > 
> > 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.

Yep, I have it as a pre-commit hook in git and it helps a lot. However,
sometimes I need to do '--no-verify' on false positives.

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.

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