Re: [PATCH linux-kselftest/test v6] lib/list-test: add a test for the 'list' doubly linked list

[Joe Perches]

On Wed, 2019-10-30 at 22:12 +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 10:27:12AM -0600, shuah wrote:
> > > It's better to ignore checkpatch and other scripts when they are wrong.
> > > (unless the warning message inspires you to make the code more readable
> > > for humans).
> > > 
> > 
> > It gets confusing when to ignore and when not to. It takes work to
> > figure out and it is subjective.
> > 
> 
> In this case, it's not subjective because checkpatch is clearly not
> working as intended.

checkpatch _is_ working as intended.
It was never intended to be perfect.

checkpatch _always_ depended on a reviewer deciding
whether its output was appropriate.

> I don't feel like "checkpatch clean" is a useful criteria for applying
> patches.

Nor do I.

> The other things about warnings is that I always encourage people to
> just ignore old warnings.  If you're running Smatch and you see a
> warning in ancient code that means I saw it five years ago and didn't
> fix it so it's a false positive.  Old warnings are always 100% false
> positives.

That'd be not absolute either because it depended on your
historical judgment as to whether an old warning was in fact
a defect or not.

People make mistakes.
Regex based scripts are by design stupid and untrustworthy.

Mistakes will be made.
Just fix the actual defects in code as soon as possible.