On 25/04/11 16:02, Joe Perches wrote:
On Mon, 2011-04-25 at 15:36 +1000, Graeme Russ wrote:
There has been a bit of discussion lately on the U-Boot mailing list regarding the use of checkpatch for U-Boot patches (see http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2011-April/090954.html)
U-Boot uses the Linux coding style and checkpatch is therefore a very good tool for us to use to check style compliance. However, checkpatch has a few Linux specific checks which throw up false warnings for U-Boot patches like:
WARNING: consider using kstrto* in preference to simple_strto* WARNING: Use #include <linux/$file> instead of <asm/$file>
Also, checkpatch seems to be checking not only patched lines, but context lines as well. There is a policy for U-Boot patches to not intermix whitespace / code cleanup changes and functional changes in in the same patch. So to achieve zero warnings and errors, the submitter is forced to create an additional code-cleanup patch in addition to the functionality patch. The code cleanup can end up being significantly larger than the functionality change which discourages casual submitters.
So I have a pretty simple question to ask of LKML - Will checkpatch patches to create a 'U-Boot' command-line option to explicitly filter out Linux specific warnings and errors ever be accepted into checkpatch, or will we be required to create and maintain a U-Boot specific version?
P.S. If you could please keep the U-Boot mailing list Cc'd, that would be appreciated
Hi Graeme.
Perhaps some sort of .checkpatch.conf file could be introduced which could be linked to specific types of errors/warnings/checks that should be reported or ignored.
checkpatch has central routines to emit messages.
sub ERROR { if (report("ERROR: $_[0]\n")) { our $clean = 0; our $cnt_error++; } } sub WARN { if (report("WARNING: $_[0]\n")) { our $clean = 0; our $cnt_warn++; } } sub CHK { if ($check && report("CHECK: $_[0]\n")) { our $clean = 0; our $cnt_chk++; } }
For instance, warnings could be changed to include a new unique identifier for each message.
from WARN("Signed-off-by: is the preferred form\n" . $herecurr); to WARN($WARN_SIGN_OFF, "Signed-off-by: is the preferred form\n" . $herecurr);
and the ERROR/WARN/CHK routines could be extended to use entries in the .conf file to enable/disable each message.
uboot could then use an appropriate .conf file.
I like this - And checkpatch.pl could set the default options for 'Linux flavour' so Linux would not need a .conf file :)
BUT - The question still remains - Will patches for obviously non-Linux related 'features' of checkpatch be welcomed and incorporated into checkpatch?
Regards,
Graeme