Re: checkpatch encouragement improvements (was RE: [MAINTAINERS / KERNEL SUMMIT] AI patch review tools)

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Fri, 2025-10-10 at 12:11 -0500, Rob Herring wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 11:03 AM Bird, Tim <Tim.Bird@sony.com> wrote:
> > Before I rattled off my ideas, I did a quick check to see if anything like what I had
> > in mind had already been suggested, and I found this:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/all/cover.3dd1d0c1f15a7a7c418f20ebafc9719afc1c2704.1510840787.git-series.knut.omang@oracle.com/
> > 
> > That's a submission by Knut Omang from 2017 that adds support for running
> > checkpatch.pl on the whole kernel source, integrated into kbuild.
> > 
> > It looks like it was not adopted.
> > 
> > That patchset allows:
> > 1) fine-tuning the set of items that checkpatch checks for
> > 2) using a config file to control the fine tuning
> > 3) allowing selection of the groups of checks (so that preferences of
> > individual maintainers or sub-systems could be adhered to)
> > 
> > My ideas for tackling false-positives was along those same lines.
> > 1) determine a list of "must-have" items, that everyone supports as true-positives
> > 2) having a way to designate groups of items that were deemed as true-positives
> >      - by creating a profile of items, specific to a subsystem or maintainer
> >      - having the 'true-positives' profile under the control of the maintainer or subsystem
> > 3) creating a mechanism to tell checkpatch which profile to use
[]
> I think it would be good if we ran checkpatch
> on every patch, but start with only checks with no false positives and
> ones every maintainer agrees on. Then we can add to it from there
> perhaps enabling per subsystem checks.

checkpatch is stupid.
checkpatch has very few checks with no false positives.

Maybe have something like a per-subdirectory/subsystem
.checkpatch.conf file and have checkpatch walk up the directory chain
when checking patches or files.