Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

I'm beginning to think we need to have an entry in the kernel newbie's FAQ warning people that the output of various scripts such as checkpatch and get_maintainer are not authoritative, and are heuristics intended to be supplemented by human intelligence.

-- Ted Ts'o

to post comments

No, put the warning in the tool output

Posted Sep 30, 2010 14:21 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (1 responses)

No. It'd be better to put that brief warning in the output of the tool itself. That way, *anyone* who uses the tool is presented with that information. Of course, they may ignore it anyway, but I think that would reduce the perceived flood.

No, put the warning in the tool output

Posted Sep 30, 2010 18:27 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

The thing I'd like is if checkpatch (in patch mode) gave an error if a hunk doesn't actually do anything. In addition to warning people who just try to fix (file mode) checkpatch warnings, it would note the situation where someone cleans up the style around a spot where they're putting a temporary debug check and ends up with just the style cleanup.