Re: [PATCH 01/21] fs: Replace CURRENT_TIME_SEC with current_fs_time()

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Thu Jun 09 2016 - 15:15:18 EST


On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 12:35 AM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> You create line longer than 80 characters for affs and reiserfs. Please
> wrap those lines properly.

No, please do *NOT* do things like that.

These kind of mechanical patches should

(a) be as mechanical as possible (and see elsewhere about why I think
'sb' should be 'inode' and the patch should have been 95% automated
with a trivial script thanks to that change)

(b) be made as easy to verify visually as possible.

That (b) means that a conversion should *not* add whitespace fixups or
add other non-mechanical cleanups, because it's a *lot* easier to see
that a conversion like

- inode->i_mtime = inode->i_ctime = CURRENT_TIME_SEC;
+ inode->i_mtime = inode->i_ctime = current_fs_time(inode);

makes no other changes, but if you start doing line-splitting or other
transformations (add new variables etc to get at 'sb'), suddenly you
have to verify the patch at a completely different level.

In other words, it's actually really important to make these kinds of
bulk changes be very very obvious. Including to the point of making
them visually easier to scan as a patch by not making any other
changes.

Linus