Re: Anyone have ideas for checkpatch improvements ?

[Joe Perches]

One of the linux-mentees, Dwaipayan Ray, asked me in a private
email for ideas for improvements to checkpatch.

Though I am not his nominal mentor, my response to him was the below.

Does anyone have any more ideas for checkpatch improvements or
enhancements?

---

On Fri, 2021-01-15 at 21:02 +0530, Dwaipayan Ray wrote:
> I am actually writing to you
> regarding any possible ideas for checkpatch or any improvements
> you would like to see moving forward with checkpatch.
> 
> The last time you had suggested about --fix options. But as we saw
> that maybe some places are better off with it. So do you have
> anything particular in mind?
> 
> Again, thanks a lot in advance. Since my mentorship will go on till
> about march, I am indeed in dire need of ideas.

You could:

o Separate the various tests into individual modules that are aggregated
  at startup.

o Create a test suite.

o Externally document the thing with use cases, all the named tests
  are not particularly documented.

o Add --verbose test descriptions, so 'why this message is emitted'
  description is optionally available to / understood by the user.

o Add support for various brace location / required spacing styles.