[Linux-kernel-mentees] Clarification on the behaviour of checkpatch.pl

Mauro Carvalho Chehab mchehab at kernel.org
Mon Apr 20 06:56:41 UTC 2020


Em Mon, 20 Apr 2020 02:20:19 +0200
Saheed Bolarinwa <refactormyself at gmail.com> escreveu:

> Hello,
> 
> My experience is that checkpatch.pl will not flag some warnings when I use
> 
> the '-f' flag. This especially true for .rst files. My understanding is 
> that this flag
> 
> is needed to use it with a raw source file instead of a patch.
> 
> Please, I will like to confirm if this is a normal behaviour or is it my 
> system setup.
> 
> Below is an example from the current stable release linux-5.6.y
> 
>     [saheed at net linux-stable]$ perl ./scripts/checkpatch.pl -f
>     ./Documentation/admin-guide/hw-vuln/tsx_async_abort.rst
>     total: 0 errors, 0 warnings, 279 lines checked
> 
>     ./Documentation/admin-guide/hw-vuln/tsx_async_abort.rst has no
>     obvious style problems and is ready for submission.
> 
> 
>     [saheed at net linux-stable]$ perl ./scripts/checkpatch.pl
>     ./Documentation/admin-guide/hw-vuln/tsx_async_abort.rst
>     WARNING: Possible unwrapped commit description (prefer a maximum 75
>     chars per line)
>     #6:
>     TAA is a hardware vulnerability that allows unprivileged speculative
>     access to
> 
>     ERROR: Does not appear to be a unified-diff format patch
> 
>     total: 1 errors, 1 warnings, 0 lines checked

If you don't use "-f" flag, then you need to pass a patch to checkpatch,
e. g.:

	git show --pretty=email | ./scripts/checkpatch.pl

That's btw what you need to do with all patches you would submit upstream.

The "-f" flag is used only when you want to run a check on an entire file
(and not to the lines modified by a patch).


Thanks,
Mauro


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