Re: [PATCH] staging: fsl-mc: fix fsl_mc_is_allocatable strcmps

From: Dan Carpenter
Date: Wed Aug 16 2017 - 08:07:31 EST


On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 12:44:51PM +0100, Colin King wrote:
> From: Colin Ian King <colin.king@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> The previous fix removed the equal to zero comparisons by the strcmps and
> now the function always returns true. Fix this by adding in the missing
> logical negation operators.
>
> Detected by CoverityScan, CID#1452267 ("Constant expression result")
>
> Fixes: b93ad9a067e1 ("staging: fsl-mc: be consistent when checking strcmp() return")

Ugh... I did review the original patch at all. Sorry. It's better to
use "== 0" because it's idiomatic.

strcmp(foo, bar) == 0 means foo == bar
strcmp(foo, bar) != 0 means foo != bar
strcmp(foo, bar) < 0 means foo < bar alphabetically.

It's way more readable. strcmp() bugs are fairly common when people
don't use == 0 and != 0. There are other places where != 0 hurts
readability, such as checking for errors:

if (frob() != 0) {

In this case, frob() is returning negative error codes, but it's not
really returning the number zero, it's returning "success". So it
should be:

ret = frob();
if (ret) {

Comparing against NULL really doesn't add anything either. But if
you're talking about the number zero then you should use == 0.

if (len == 0)
return 0;

regards,
dan carpenter