On Wed, 2019-10-30 at 22:12 +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 10:27:12AM -0600, shuah wrote:
It's better to ignore checkpatch and other scripts when they are wrong. (unless the warning message inspires you to make the code more readable for humans).
It gets confusing when to ignore and when not to. It takes work to figure out and it is subjective.
In this case, it's not subjective because checkpatch is clearly not working as intended.
checkpatch _is_ working as intended. It was never intended to be perfect.
checkpatch _always_ depended on a reviewer deciding whether its output was appropriate.
I don't feel like "checkpatch clean" is a useful criteria for applying patches.
Nor do I.
The other things about warnings is that I always encourage people to just ignore old warnings. If you're running Smatch and you see a warning in ancient code that means I saw it five years ago and didn't fix it so it's a false positive. Old warnings are always 100% false positives.
That'd be not absolute either because it depended on your historical judgment as to whether an old warning was in fact a defect or not.
People make mistakes. Regex based scripts are by design stupid and untrustworthy.
Mistakes will be made. Just fix the actual defects in code as soon as possible.