Re: "CodingStyle: Clarify and complete chapter 7" in docs-next

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Thu, 2016-09-22 at 13:57 +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> Sure. But I'm afraid you keep changing topics and I have no idea where
> you are going. We started with "should there be a space before jump
> labels", then out of nowhere we were discussing the wording of the
> output of checkpatch (how is that related?) and now you pull statistics
> out of your hat, like these numbers imply anything.

No, not out of a hat.  Those are the results of a silly script that
runs checkpatch on every .[ch] kernel file (but not tools/) with:

	--show-types --terse --emacs --strict --no-summary --quiet -f

The magnitude of "ERRORS" is high and it's not necessary or useful
to modify old or obsolete code just to reduce that magnitude.

> checkpatch was called checkPATCH for a reason.

That's why I promote the --force option to limit using checkpatch on
files outside of staging.

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9332205/

Andrew?  Are you going to apply that one day?

> ERROR means that the new code isn't allowed to do that. Period.

Disagree.  The compiler doesn't care.  The value of consistency in
reducing defects is very hard to quantify.