Re: [GIT PULL] ext4 changes for the 6.4 merge window

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 12:11 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, I don't know that we have any buildbots that run smatch,
> and most developers don't, so it'll always be an after-the-fact patch

Yeah. The advantage of compiler warnings really is that they get
caught quicker and developers will react to them much better. They
might cause the code to be properly re-organized or rewritten to be
much nicer, for example.

The "trivial tree" kind of fixups for random other issues that get
noticed separately tend to be much more about "work around issue". It
might be the proper fix, of course, but it didn't end up being taken
into account when writing the code, so it often ends up being just a
"papering over the warning" kind of fix. Particularly since the person
trying to fix the problem generally isn't the main developer of that
code.

         Linus