On Thu, 2016-12-15 at 18:10 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 5:57 PM, Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > In fact, I thought we already upped the check-patch limit to 100? > > > > Nope, CodingStyle neither. > > > > Last time I tried was awhile ago. > > Ok, it must have been just talked about, and with the exceptions for > strings etc I may not have seen as many of the really annoying line > breaks lately. > > I don't mind a 80-column "soft limit" per se: if some code > consistently goes over 80 columns, there really is something seriously > wrong there. So 80 columns may well be the right limit for that kind > of check (or even less). Newspaper column widths were relatively small for a good reason. I think most of the uses of simple statements should be on a single line. I'd rather see just a few arguments on a single line than a dozen though. Especially those with long identifiers, functions with many arguments are just difficult to visually scan. > But if we have just a couple of lines that are longer (in a file that > is 3k+ lines), I'd rather not break those. > > I tend use "git grep" a lot, and it's much easier to see function > argument use if it's all on one line. > > Of course, some function calls really are *so* long that they have to > be broken up, but that's where the "if it's a couple of lines that go > a bit over the 80 column limit..." exception basically comes in. > > Put another way: long lines definitely aren't good. But breaking long > lines has some downsides too, so there should be a balance between the > two, rather than some black-and-white limit. > > In fact, we've seldom had cases where black-and-white limits work well. One thing that _would_ be useful is some enhancement to git grep that would look for multi-line statements more easily. The git grep -P option doesn't span lines. grep 2.5.4 was the last version that supported the -P option to grep through for multiple lines. It'd be nice to have something like git grep --code_style=c90 --function <foo> that'd show all multiple line uses/definitions/declarations of a particular function. I played with extending git grep a bit once, mostly to get the \s mechanism to span lines. It kinda worked. Still, it seems like real work to implement well.