Re: [PATCH] Deprecate checkpatch.pl --file

[Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 08:50:33AM -0800, Daniel Walker wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 17:14 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> 
> 
> > +if ($file) {
> > +	print <<EOL
> > +WARNING: Using --file mode. Please do not send patches to linux-kernel
> > +that change whole existing files if you did not significantly change most
> > +of the the file for other reasons anyways or just wrote the file newly
> > +from scratch. Pure code style patches have a significant cost in a
> > +quickly changing code base like Linux because they cause rejects
> > +with other changes.
> > +If you're sure you want to use whole file mode please use --file-force
> > +EOL
> > +;
> > +	exit(1);
> 
> Can't say I like this too much .. It sounds like your telling people to
> stop sending cleanup patches, which doesn't make much sense .. We want a
> clean kernel .. Or at least I do ..

It is a simple pain/benefit issue.
Fixing the 25 errors and 13 warnings in kernel/profile.c may look
like an easy task but then we put additional burden on the 10 people
that have patches pending for this file.

It is the same reason why we do not run a 'kill-trailing-whitespace'
on the full kernel tree.

	Sam