Re: [RFC] Proposal to relax warnings of htmldocs

[Jani Nikula]

On Tue, 15 Aug 2023, Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 08:35:40PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 8:23 PM Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> > As an alternative, of course, we could consider turning off those
>> > specific warnings entirely for normal builds.
>> 
>> It could be nice to get to enforce warning-free builds as soon as possible.
>> 
>> Perhaps we could move those to a `W=1`-like group and clean them over
>> time instead? Or do we have that already?
>
> I think the problem is that we don't run kernel-doc by default.  Instead,
> it's only run for W=1 (and higher) builds.  That's why Carlos doesn't
> see the problems he is introducing in his own builds.  Of course, if
> AMD required building with W=1 then they'd see these problems earlier
> in their own testing.  Apparently they don't.
>
> Is it time to just run kernel-doc by default?  There aren't _that_
> many kernel-doc warnings now.  Not compared to how they used to be.
> And enabling them for everyone means that new ones won't sneak in.
> I haven't timed how much extra time kernel-doc adds to a build.
> Perhaps that's infeasible.

Personally, I believe it's easier to get at a warning free build (both
compiler W=1 warnings as well as kernel-doc) by doing it driver and
subsystem at a time, instead of, say, one warning at a time across the
entire kernel. It's just too much of a burden to fix the entire kernel
to enable a warning across the board.

To that end, the i915 Makefile enables a lot more warnings than the
defaults, and the developers and CI run the compiler and kernel-doc with
-Werror. No new warnings get introduced.

What I'd hope for is build system support to enable W=1
compiler/kernel-doc warnings for a subdir with a few lines at most,
instead of duplicating and copy-pasting tens of lines from
scripts/Makefile.extrawarn like we have to do now.


BR,
Jani.


-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center