Re: [PATCH] sched/fair: Return true,false in voluntary_active_balance()

[Joe Perches]

On Thu, 2020-05-07 at 14:45 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 07 May 2020 10:55:33 -0700
> Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > > If anything, we can teach people to try to understand their fixes, to see
> > > if something is really a fix or not. Blindly accepting changes like this,
> > > is no different than blindly submitting patches because some tool says its
> > > an issue.  
> > 
> > <shrug>
> > 
> > Most people seem to prefer bool returns with apparent bool constants
> > even though true and false are enumerator constants (int) of 1 and 0
> > in the kernel.
> > 
> > from include/linux/stddef.h:
> > 
> > enum {
> > 	false	= 0,
> > 	true	= 1
> > };
> 
> Sure, do that for new code, but we don't need these patches popping up for
> current code. That is, it's a preference not a bug.

People describe changes as a "fix" all the time for stuff
that isn't an actual fix for a logic defect but is instead
an update to a particular style preference.

Then the "fix" word causes the patch to be rather uselessly
applied to stable trees by AUTOSEL.

It's especially bad when the 'Fixes: <sha1> ("description")'
tag is also added.

It's a difficult thing to regulate and I don't believe a
good mechanism would be possible to add to checkpatch or
coccinelle to help isolate these things.

git diff -w sometimes helps, but that's not really a thing
that checkpatch could do.

Any suggestions?