Re: [PATCH] printk: Remove no longer used second struct cont

On Thu, 2016-12-15 at 18:10 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 5:57 PM, Joe Perches [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

In fact, I thought we already upped the check-patch limit to 100?

Nope, CodingStyle neither.

Last time I tried was awhile ago.

Ok, it must have been just talked about, and with the exceptions for
strings etc I may not have seen as many of the really annoying line
breaks lately.

I don't mind a 80-column "soft limit" per se: if some code
consistently goes over 80 columns, there really is something seriously
wrong there. So 80 columns may well be the right limit for that kind
of check (or even less).

Newspaper column widths were relatively small for a good reason.

I think most of the uses of simple statements should be on a single
line.  I'd rather see just a few arguments on a single line than a
dozen though.  Especially those with long identifiers, functions
with many arguments are just difficult to visually scan.

But if we have just a couple of lines that are longer (in a file that
is 3k+ lines), I'd rather not break those.

I tend use "git grep" a lot, and it's much easier to see function
argument use if it's all on one line.

Of course, some function calls really are *so* long that they have to
be broken up, but that's where the "if it's a couple of lines that go
a bit over the 80 column limit..." exception basically comes in.

Put another way: long lines definitely aren't good. But breaking long
lines has some downsides too, so there should be a balance between the
two, rather than some black-and-white limit.

In fact, we've seldom had cases where black-and-white limits work well.

One thing that _would_ be useful is some enhancement to git grep
that would look for multi-line statements more easily.

The git grep -P option doesn't span lines.

grep 2.5.4 was the last version that supported the -P option to
grep through for multiple lines.

It'd be nice to have something like
	git grep --code_style=c90 --function <foo>

that'd show all multiple line uses/definitions/declarations of a
particular function.

I played with extending git grep a bit once, mostly to get the \s
mechanism to span lines.  It kinda worked.

Still, it seems like real work to implement well.