On Thu, 2016-09-22 at 11:24 +0200, Jean Delvare wrote: [] > > The seriousness with which some beginners take these message > > types though is troublesome, [] > You need to think in terms of actual use cases. Who uses checkpatch and > why? I think there are 3 groups of users: > * Beginners. They won't run the script by themselves, instead they will > submit a patch which infringes a lot of coding style rules, and the > maintainer will point them to checkpatch and ask for a resubmission > which makes checkpatch happy. Being beginners, they can only rely on > the script itself to only report things which need to be fixed, by > default. > * Experienced developers. Who simply want to make sure they did not > overlook anything before they post their work for review. They have > the knowledge to decide if they want to ignore some of the warnings. > * People with too much spare time, looking for anything they could > "contribute" to the kernel. They will use --subjective and piss off > every maintainer they can find. I think you overlook the category of a beginner submitting "my first kernel patch" which is a "coding style" defect of some type. The Eudyptula and Outreachy programs seem to encourage these sorts of patches. This is where "scripts/checkpatch.pl -f <file>" is most used. I believe adding the --force option might be useful to restrict cleanup-style-only patches outside of staging. There's nothing wrong with cleanup style patches, it can be good introduction to compiler/config tool & kernel setup. > I would rather suggest: > > ERROR -> MUST_FIX > WARNING -> SHOULD_FIX > CHECK -> MAY_FIX MUST is much stronger language than I would prefer. There are still about a quarter million ERRORs just for spacing issues in the kernel tree. Here are the top 10 ERROR checkpatch messages treewide as of a few days ago, $ grep ERROR checkpatch.short_sorted_20160917 268308 ERROR:SPACING 37340 ERROR:CODE_INDENT 27678 ERROR:TRAILING_WHITESPACE 21024 ERROR:COMPLEX_MACRO 14048 ERROR:POINTER_LOCATION 12207 ERROR:TRAILING_STATEMENTS 11079 ERROR:OPEN_BRACE 6802 ERROR:ASSIGN_IN_IF 3940 ERROR:RETURN_PARENTHESES 2322 ERROR:NON_OCTAL_PERMISSIONS Maybe there could be some better classifications of the various messages. But there are about two million checkpatch messages overall in the kernel tree. That's a lot. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
