Re: [PATCH 1/2] checkpatch: Add support for Checkpatch-ignore patch footer

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2025 at 04:04:22PM +0000, Brendan Jackman wrote:
> Checkpatch sometimes has false positives. This makes it less useful for
> automatic usage: tools like b4 [0] can run checkpatch on all of your
> patches and give you a quick overview. When iterating on a branch, it's
> tiresome to manually re-check that any errors are known false positives.
> 
> This patch adds a feature to record in the commit message that a patch
> might produce a certain checkpatch error, and that this is an expected
> false positive. Recording this information in the patch itself can also
> highlight it to reviewers, so they can make a judgment as to whether
> it's appropriate to ignore.
> 
> To avoid significant reworks to the Perl code, this is implemented by
> mutating a global variable while processing each patch. (The variable
> name refers to a patch as a "file" for consistency with other code).
> 
> This feature is immediately adopted for this commit itself, which
> falls afoul of EMAIL_SUBJECT due to the word "checkpatch" appearing in
> the "Checkpatch-ignore" reference in the title - a good example of a
> false positive.
> 
> [0] b4 - see "--check" arg
>     https://b4.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/contributor/prep.html
> 
> Checkpatch-ignore: EMAIL_SUBJECT
> Signed-off-by: Brendan Jackman <jackmanb@google.com>

Do we really want this to become part of the permanent commit message? I'm
pretty sure this won't go over well with many.

-K