Re: [GIT PULL] trivial for 4.9

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Fri Oct 07 2016 - 16:25:30 EST


On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 1:18 PM, Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> No, because any of those can be followed by a bare printk
> or a pr_cont that continues the original line.

.. and quite frankly, if they do, we should fix *that*.

>> So really. It's a step backwards. We shouldn't need them. We should
>> *remove* '\n' at the end, and then if that actually causes problems,
>> we should fix those problems.
>
> $ git grep -w printk * | grep -v "^tools" | grep -v KERN | wc -l
> 13176
>
> Have at it but here are _far_ fewer missing newlines
> and it'd be much lower churn to fix those than remove
> all the newlines and fix the missing continuations.

None of that has any relevance to the question "why should we add
extra commits to go backwards"?

Those newlines aren't "missing". The lack of newlines is how modern
code can and does work. It's that simple.

And no, I'm not interested in some mass conversion the other way _either_.

I find this noise to add '\n' characters completely pointless. It's
bogus stupid churn that doesn't actually make the source code better,
and it also doesn't actually seem to fix any behavioral issues.

And if there are behavioral issues, they should (a) be pointed out and
(b) be fixed.

In *no* case does it make sense to randomly just add newline
characters without even having a reason for it.

End of story.

Linus