Re: [PATCH] checkpatch: improve handling of email comments

From: Joe Perches
Date: Fri Oct 30 2020 - 07:54:16 EST


On Fri, 2020-10-30 at 14:37 +0530, Dwaipayan Ray wrote:
> checkpatch has limited support for parsing email comments. It only
> support single name comments or single after address comments.
> Whereas, RFC 5322 specifies that comments can be inserted in
> between any tokens of the email fields.
>
> Improve comment parsing mechanism in checkpatch.
>
> What is handled now:
>
> - Multiple name/address comments
> - Comments anywhere in between name/address
> - Nested comments like (John (Doe))
>
> A brief analysis of checkpatch output on v5.0..v5.7 showed that
> after these modifications, the number of BAD_SIGN_OFF warnings
> came down from 2944 to 1424, and FROM_SIGN_OFF_MISMATCH came
> down from 2366 to 2330.
>
> So, a total of 1556 false positives were resolved in total.

A mere reduction in messages emitted isn't necessarily good.

Please send me privately a complete list of these nominally
false positive messages that are no longer emitted.

I believe one of the relatively common incorrect messages is
for the cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> where a version number is
continued on the same line after a #.

CC: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # for versions x.y.z and above