Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/1] checkpatch: checker for comment block

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 13/12/18 19:01, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Dec 2018 at 17:57, Wainer dos Santos Moschetta
> <wainersm@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> Eduardo Habkost pointed out a malformed block of comments on my
>> patch [1] that I had ran checkpatch.pl and no warn/error was
>> reported. Then I realized the script does not catch such as
>> case (or it had a bug).
>>
>> It turns out that checkpatch.pl does not parse comment blocks (If I understood
>> its code correctly...). So I implemented a checker that warns about:
>> 1. block doesn't begin on its own line.
>> Example:
>>   /* blah blah
>>    * and blah blah
>>    */
> 
> I sent a patch to do this a little while back:
>  https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10561557/
> 
> It didn't get applied because Paolo disagreed with having
> our tools enforcing what our style guide says.

I didn't disagree with that---I disagreed with having a single style in
the style guide, because unlike most other blatant violations of the
coding style (eg. braces), this one is pervasive in maintained code and
I don't want code that I maintain to mix two comment styles.

So I proposed two alternatives:

- someone fixes all the comment blocks which are "starred" but don't
have a lone "/*" at the beginning, and then we can commit that patch;

- we allow "/* foo" on the first line, except for doc comments and for
the first line of the file (author/license block), and fix the style
guide accordingly.

Paolo