Re: [PATCH V2] checkpatch: Improve "return is not a function" test

Joe Perches
2013-11-04T22:24:12Z

On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 14:21 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Oct 2013 16:12:44 -0700 Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:
>
> > This now uses the "$balanced_parens" test and also makes
> > the test depend on perl v5.10 and higher.
>
> What happens if one uses an older perl version? A mysterious-looking
> splat, I assume?
>
> It would be nicer to have some explicit perl version test which tells
> user what the problem is, and which perl version is needed?
>

There is such a test already.
You Signed-off on it.

commit d62a201f24cba74e2fbf9f6f7af86ff5f5e276fc
Author: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Date: Wed Sep 11 14:23:56 2013 -0700

checkpatch: enforce sane perl version

I got a bug report from a couple of users who said checkpatch.pl was
broken for them. It was erroring out on fairly random lines most commonly
with messages like:

Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <--HERE in m/(\((?:[^\(\)]++ <-

The bug reporter was running a version of perl 5.8 which was end-of-lifed
in 2008: http://www.cpan.org/src/. Versions of perl this old are at
_best_ quite untested. At worst, they are crusty and known to be
completely broken.

If folks have a system _that_ old, then we should have mercy on them and
give them a half-decent error message rather than fail with nutty error
messages.

This patch enforces that checkpatch.pl is run with perl 5.10, which was
end-of-lifed in 2009. The new --ignore-perl-version command-line switch
will let folks override this if they want.

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>