Re: [PATCH 8/14] drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.c: delete doubleassignment

From: Julia Lawall
Date: Wed Oct 27 2010 - 01:03:53 EST


On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Julia Lawall wrote:
> > From: Julia Lawall <julia@xxxxxxx>
> >
> > Delete successive assignments to the same location.
>
> There are often results of mismerges or other assorted screw ups, often
> done by the maintainer itself (e.g. me in thinkpad-acpi's case) during
> development.
>
> The patch is correct, and I thank you for the head's up. But let me
> track down what caused it first, hmm? I also highly recommend that this
> should be done in all cases you find, instead of just blindly fixing the
> assignment. I suggest using git --blame to track down what added the
> duplicated assignments, and check if it looks sane...
>
> It is often a VERY BAD IDEA to remove such markers of potential
> brokennes without checking out if they're actually helpfully trying to
> warn you of worse badness :p
>
> But hey, maybe you've already done that. If you did, I apologise for
> preaching to the choir.

I didn't look for the original source of the problem, except in the case
of [PATCH 6/14] arch/mips/pmc-sierra/yosemite/setup.c where I found it
already in the pre-git era. Thanks fo rthe suggestion. On the other
hand, I was very selective about which code I changed. In particular I
left a number of cases like:

x = NULL; // or 0 etc
x = foo(...); // ie a NULL returning function

I figured that this isn't hurting anything, and perhaps it is informative
about what kind of value foo might return.

julia
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