Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: check for missing Fixes tags

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2023-06-06T10:19:00Z

On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 11:30:27AM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> This check looks for common words that probably indicate a patch
> is a fix. For now the regex is:
>
> (BUG: KASAN|Call Trace:|syzkaller|stable\@)
>
> Why are stable patches encouraged to have a fixes tag? Some people mark
> their stable patches as "# 5.10" etc. This is not as useful as a Fixes
> tag. The Fixes tag helps in review. It helps people to not cherry-pick
> buggy patches without also cherry-picking the fix.
>
> Also if a bug affects the 5.7 kernel some people will round it up to
> 5.10+ because 5.7 is not supported on kernel.org. It's possible the Bad
> Binder bug was caused by this sort of gap where companies outside of
> kernel.org are supporting different kernels from kernel.org?
>
> Should it be counted as a Fix when a patch just silences harmless
> WARN_ON() stack trace. Yes. Definitely.
>
> Is silencing compiler warnings a fix? It seems unfair to the original
> authors, but we use -Werror now, and warnings break the build so let's
> just add Fixes tags for those. I tell people that silencing static
> checker warnings is not a fix but the rules on this vary by subsystem.
>
> Is fixing a minor LTP issue (Linux Test Project) a fix? Probably? It's
> hard to know what to do if the LTP test has technically always been
> broken.
>
> One clear false positive from this check is when a patch updated the
> debug output and the commit message included before and after Call
> Traces. Sometimes you should just ignore checkpatch.
>
> Signed-off-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@linaro.org>
> ---

Nice!

Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>