Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: improve handling of email comments

From: Lukas Bulwahn
Date: Fri Oct 30 2020 - 07:58:53 EST




On Fri, 30 Oct 2020, Joe Perches wrote:

> On Fri, 2020-10-30 at 14:37 +0530, Dwaipayan Ray wrote:
> > checkpatch has limited support for parsing email comments. It only
> > support single name comments or single after address comments.
> > Whereas, RFC 5322 specifies that comments can be inserted in
> > between any tokens of the email fields.
> >
> > Improve comment parsing mechanism in checkpatch.
> >
> > What is handled now:
> >
> > - Multiple name/address comments
> > - Comments anywhere in between name/address
> > - Nested comments like (John (Doe))
> >
> > A brief analysis of checkpatch output on v5.0..v5.7 showed that
> > after these modifications, the number of BAD_SIGN_OFF warnings
> > came down from 2944 to 1424, and FROM_SIGN_OFF_MISMATCH came
> > down from 2366 to 2330.
> >
> > So, a total of 1556 false positives were resolved in total.
>
> A mere reduction in messages emitted isn't necessarily good.
>

Agree. That is why I also went through the list of those warnings.

I could not spot any obvious true positive among the reduced ones.

> Please send me privately a complete list of these nominally
> false positive messages that are no longer emitted.
>
> I believe one of the relatively common incorrect messages is
> for the cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> where a version number is
> continued on the same line after a #.
>
> CC: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # for versions x.y.z and above
>

That was one, another common pattern was just quotes put inconsistently at
different places.

Lukas