On 28/10/19 02:15PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi Pratyush,

On Fri, 25 Oct 2019, Pratyush Yadav wrote:

quoted

A lot of places have unused global variables declared. Remove them.

It started as a couple of quick fixes and ended up in me writing an ugly
hacky script to catch all the instances of unused global declarations.
Lot more than I expected.

The script can be found at [0].

Wouldn't it make more sense to integrate that script into a Makefile
target `check`, rather than hiding it in a gist (that might become
unavailable if GitHub goes away, as some of you seem to fear)?

The idea of the script was just a quick hack to list as many instances 
as possible, and then I could manually verify them. It turned out to be 
pretty accurate. I linked it here so other people can know what I used 
to find these, and can suggest some cases I missed, if any. That's why I 
linked to the script in the cover letter, and not in the commit message.

It would probably be a better idea to use a linter/static analyzer. This 
would provide much better coverage than a script written for one-off 
usage.

I looked up some linters. There doesn't seem to be a lot of options, and 
most of them are not very good. One option I found is [0], but it gives 
more useless warnings than useful ones. Tcl being a really difficult 
language to lint doesn't help. So unless someone knows a good Tcl 
linter, maybe the best compromise would be to clean up the script and 
add it to our build process. But I'd really prefer a "proper" linter.
 

quoted

The script at [0] will only catch the unused globals in 'proc's. But
git-gui also has 'method's and 'constructor's. Just change '^proc' to
'^constructor' or '^method'.

Why not use `grep -E -n -e '^(proc|method)'`?

No particular reason. I just wrote it for 'proc', and then realized I 
might as well check 'method' and 'constructor'. Like I said, the aim of 
the script was use-and-throw.
 

quoted

I manually checked each instance before removing just to be sure I'm not
doing something wrong. Still, a bit of testing would be appreciated.
Just apply this patch and go on about your business as usual. There
_should_ be no change in the behaviour. I tested some basic functions
like commit, push, etc, and they work fine for me.

I would, if I used Git GUI regularly ;-)

[0] https://github.com/Xilinx/XilinxTclStore/blob/master/support/linter/tcl_lint.tcl

-- 
Regards,
Pratyush Yadav