Re: [PATCH] Deprecate checkpatch.pl --file

[Daniel Walker <dwalker@mvista.com>]

On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 13:20 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 10:01:19AM -0800, Daniel Walker wrote:
> > > It is a simple pain/benefit issue.
> > > Fixing the 25 errors and 13 warnings in kernel/profile.c may look
> > > like an easy task but then we put additional burden on the 10 people
> > > that have patches pending for this file.
> > 
> > This goes for all patches on kernel/profile.c tho .. If I make a big mod
> > to kernel/profile.c, that will screw up anyone else who has patches for
> > that file..
> 
> Obviously, but why make it worse?  And what's more important?  A
> "clean tree" (especially when some of the things that checkpatch.pl
> flag are arbitrary and Not All That Important), or wasting developers'
> time invalidating potentially huge number of patches thanks to cleanup
> patches?

What I was saying in my first email was we can throttle "patches"
arbitrarily (I think Andrew/Linus even have a merge period for these
types of patches) ..  So that's not the issue .. I feel style clean ups
are fundamentally good.. So what we don't want to do is discourage the
creation of good patches, which is what I think Andi is doing..

If there's something in checkpatch.pl that you think is "Not All That
Important", than send a patch to remove those cases and we can discuss
that directly.. I'm not saying the tool is perfect..

Daniel