[Cocci] Prepending '*' to an expression (Was: [PATCH V2] scripts/coccinelle/misc/memcpy-assign.cocci: Replace memcpy with struct assignment)

[mstefani@redhat.com (Michael Stefaniuc)]

Hello Peter,

On 01/26/2013 02:28 AM, Peter Senna Tschudin wrote:
> Thank you for testing.
> 
> I made changes on the semantic patch. I believe it fixed the problem.
> Can you test it?
while it does fix the issue it makes the cocci script less readable and
works only in that particular case. Not sure it is worth the effort as
the bad generated patch can be trivially detected and easily fixed
manually. My email was more of a bug report / feature request for
coccinelle than an improvement request to the script.

Though I've noticed an other issue with the script: Any reason you use
"Options: --no-includes"? While it does speed up things it misses quite
a few cases as a lot of types are defined in the headers.

bye
	michael

> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Michael Stefaniuc <mstefani@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 01/23/2013 11:06 PM, Peter Senna Tschudin wrote:
>>> There are error-prone memcpy() that can be replaced by struct
>>> assignment that are type-safe and much easier to read. This semantic
>>> patch looks for memcpy() that can be replaced by struct assignment.
>> thanks for the script by Peter this script as it proved useful for Wine
>> too. Though in one case it generated the wrong patch.
>>
>> @@
>> struct struct_name to;
>> struct struct_name from;
>> @@
>>
>> 'to' and 'from' above are expressions and not identifiers; that's a
>> feature. The bug happened in the replacement
>> - memcpy(foos + count, &foo, sizeof(struct foo_t));
>> + *foos + count = foo;
>>
>> Shouldn't cocinelle automatically add the parenthesis when prepending a
>> '*' or '&' to an expression which isn't an identifier?
>>
>>
>> The script itself is "safe" as the compiler will error out on that
>> patch. And the people that just take generated patches and submit them
>> without even compiling them deserve the public tar and feathering ;)