Re: [PATCH] Documentation: checkpatch: Document some more message types

On Mon, 2021-09-27 at 11:43 -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

Utkarsh Verma [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Added and documented 3 new message types:
- UNNECESSARY_INT
- UNSPECIFIED_INT
- UNNECESSARY_ELSE

Signed-off-by: Utkarsh Verma <redacted>
---
 Documentation/dev-tools/checkpatch.rst | 47 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 47 insertions(+)

So...when you send multiple patches with the same subject line that's
always a bad sign.  We really want a "git --oneline" listing to give a
good idea of what the patch does, and that depends on more descriptive
subject lines.

In this case, something like:

  docs: checkpatch: add UNNECESSARY/UNSPECIFIED_INT and UNNECESSARY_ELSE

I can fix up these two patches, but please try to keep this in mind for
future work.

(applying the patches now).

The unnecessary_else description isn't particularly good as the
checkpatch output doesn't describe multiple if/else if/else if type
returns where the message should not apply.

For this type of use, the checkpatch message is not necessarily correct
and because it could be a patch context, there's no way for checkpatch
to know if it's correct or not.

	if (foo) {
		...
	} else if (bar) {
		...
		return [val];
	} else {
		...
	}