Re: [cocci] behavior change in semantic patches since c36b51ffc889 …

[Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring@web.de>]

> I tried this out and it does seem to fix the white spacing for our
> particular cases.

Thanks for such positive feedback.

Will your development interests grow also for further SmPL code variations?


> From here, I just repeated the process until git bisect told me which
> commit had the breaking change.

How many iterations did you need to try out here?


> There were a couple gotchas where the checked out commit didn't compile
> but I managed to figure out which changes were needed and manually
> pulled those in each time.

Do you see chances to improve such a process anyhow?


> I think the white spacing is a hard problem, because each project will
> have their own style and rules. For many cases, the expectation is that
> a human would manually cleanup the results.

Various contributors are struggling with desirable adjustments also
in affected areas.


> In my case, we run this as part of our build process to clean up code
> automatically, and don't commit the results.

Thanks for another bit of background information.


>                                              I suspect this is counter
> to the original intention.

It seems that you got into a position where you may stress the importance
of safe data processing automation.


>                            One option would be to run a style formatting
> tool after transforms, to allow a tool dedicated to code formatting vs
> trying to make spatch and coccinelle do everything these can do.

Are you looking for ways to avoid extra efforts for code reformatting?


> I do think improvements in the way you can specify spacing would be
> useful but may complicate the already difficult syntax of semantic patches.
Adhering to code style requirements can be challenging.

Regards,
Markus