Re: [PATCH v3] checkpatch: add fix option for MAINTAINERS_STYLE

[Lukas Bulwahn]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 5:29 AM Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2020-11-16 at 20:26 -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Tue, 2020-11-17 at 09:35 +0530, Aditya Srivastava wrote:
> > > Checkpatch expects entries in MAINTAINERS file in a specific order and
> > > warns if the changes made do not follow the specified order.
> > >
> > > E.g., running checkpatch on commit b33bc2b878e0 ("nexthop: Add entry to
> > > MAINTAINERS") reports this warning:
> > >
> > > WARNING: Misordered MAINTAINERS entry - list file patterns in
> > > alphabetic order
> > > +F: include/uapi/linux/nexthop.h
> > > +F: include/net/netns/nexthop.h
> > >
> > > Provide a simple fix by swapping the unordered lines, if both the lines
> > > are additions (start with '+')
> >
> > On second thought, nak.
> >
> > This fails when there are 3 consecutive misordered lines.
> >
> > SECTION
> > F:    c
> > F:    b
> > F:    a
> >
>
> btw:
>
> scripts/parse-maintainers.pl already does this reordering properly so
> this particular --fix addition isn't all that useful.
>

I think the real fix is to provide some more documentation on
scripts/parse-maintainers.pl that explains how to run this script when
an author hits the warning type in checkpatch.pl.

I see these follow-up patches:

  - some documentation on scripts/parse-maintainers.pl
  - a patch to checkpatch.pl that points out this documentation when
this warning occurs.
  - maybe: improve of scripts/parse-maintainers.pl to handle exactly
this use case of a patch author (assuming that the patch was just
created with git format-patch -1) and how to get the corrected diff
for this patch.
  - maybe: a patch to checkpatch.pl that can create the command for
scripts/parse-maintainers.pl for a specific patch and which then can
be added with git commit --amend or git commit && git rebase and
squashing that in.

I think once that is done and better understood, you can much better
judge if there is really a need for a fix in checkpatch.pl.

Lukas