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

[Jean Delvare <jdelvare@suse.de>]

On Thu, 22 Sep 2016 10:49:47 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> 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

Silly is the key word here. Just don't do it.

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

I agree. Just don't do it.

> > 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?

I hope not. Looks plain wrong to me. This wont prevents idiots from
being idiots. All it does is make things more difficult for the rest of
us.

> > ERROR means that the new code isn't allowed to do that. Period.
> 
> Disagree.  The compiler doesn't care.

Which is good, because this has nothing to do with the compiler.

> The value of consistency in reducing defects is very hard to quantify.

That's not the only purpose of consistency.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support