[Linux-kernel-mentees] checkpatch.pl investigation: NO_AUTHOR_SIGN_OFF issues

Dwaipayan Ray dwaipayanray1 at gmail.com
Sat Sep 26 11:31:34 UTC 2020


> > Yes, that should help I think. Currently checkpatch is very vague
> > about Author sign offs, so subclassing it will really be helpful.
> > But at the same point I don't think it should become
> > too complex either.
>
> Agree, that is where the evaluation will help (what is really happening,
> what do we need to consider) and the severity comes into play (if we
> consider all subclasses of same severity, we do not need to differentiate
> between them.)
>
> >
> > I have already prepared a patch for the basic two classes:
> > 1) same name, different address
> > 2) same address, different name
> >
> > It would be great to have your feedback on this.
>
> Okay, I suggest to run this script on a larger set of commits and see.
>
> Probably, you can speed it your evaluation with checkpatch.pl by
> restricting it to the AUTHOR_SIGN_OFF type. I will try that over the
> weekend as well.
>
> Lukas

Hi,
So I did run my script to evaluate the type of errors that were generated.
My results are from commits between v5.7 and v5.8

1) Same address, different name

There were 32 such instances. In general, there was no regularity in the
specific error.

There were some cases with letter case mismatch. Like there was one
committer who used the names "Arend Van Spriel", and "Arend van Spriel".
I believe this error should not be generated and matching be made case
neutral.

Apart from this, the rest of the cases in this category were some with missing
first or last names, using names in other languages or having commas in
one name, using initials etc. These should be warned about.

2) Same name, different address

There were 204 such instances. Most of them were of the form in which they
used a completely different email address.

Only one case was found with an email extension.
<hpeter at gmail.com>
<hpeter+linux_kernel at gmail.com>
in commit 423d9118c624

So in general I think most email mismatches should be specified by a WARN
and for email extension there should be a --strict CHECK.

What do you think of this?

Thanks,
Dwaipayan.


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