Re: [PATCH] Add kerneldoc for flush_scheduled_work()

Ingo Molnar
2009-08-13T07:25:36Z

* James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 10:13 -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >
> > > > And here I was thinking kerneldoc doesn't actually work
> > > > like that, but perhaps Randy fixed it so the initial
> > > > description can line-wrap?
> >
> > Yes, that's what I thought too. If kerneldoc has been fixed
> > then the description line certainly should get wrapped.
>
> I really don't think it needs to be fixed: it's a feature not a
> bug. It requires people writing kernel doc actually to think of
> one line summaries.

As long as the argument is that it's good to have limitations just
because it has good effects as well (which the gist of your argument
seems to be), i disagree.

That's a very basic argument of freedom. Just consider the Gestapo
which was also a 'feature' to keep criminals in check. Did you know
that there were record low levels of petty criminality both in nazi
Germany and during communism (and under just about any totalitarian
regime)? Still nobody in their right mind is arguing that just due
to that they are the right social model ...

I think this DocBook limitation needs to be fixed, because there are
legitimate cases where a function name got too long (for no fault of
its own, but for properties of the name-space it is operating in),
and we do not want a nanny state beat it into a single line.

> LSI recently tried to submit a ten line wrapped summary which the
> current feature makes it very easy to knock back and say this must
> be a single line, so trim it and move the rest to the function
> description body.

Uhm, the democratic solution for _that_ problem is to add a very
simple check/warning to checkpatch.pl.

Freedom to use common sense and stuff. That principle is in the US
Constitution as well, or something quite similar to that, right? ;-)

Ingo