[dpdk-dev] checkpatch.pl inconsistent results

[Thomas Monjalon]

2017-02-26 16:20, Legacy, Allain:
> From: Thomas Monjalon
> > It is a false positive.
> > PRIx64 and PRIu64 are obviously allowed.
> > The only thing you need to take care is having spaces around.
> > 
> Ok, thanks Thomas.  Obviously PRIx64 and PRIu64 are acceptable so I knew that something must have been wrong with my understanding or what I was doing.   I'll ignore these and proceed to fixing the other issues missed because of the older version of checkpatch.pl that I was using.   Is there a list of acceptable false positives to avoid wasting time 
trying to figure these out? 

No we have no such list.
We could add one in the contribution guide, or we could try to catch them
in checkpatch.sh, or even better, we could try to contribute a change in
Linux repo.

> > Maybe the difference is because the first one happens in a standard
> > printf function and checkpatch would ignore the specifiers.
> 
> Just for curiosity sake I copied the line from my change in to the other patch that I mentioned and the checkpath.pl tool did not flag an error so it seems like it may be file path dependent.  Since it is a false positive I won't waste any time trying to chase this down any further. 
> 
> On the subject of using the correct version of checkpath.pl, has there been any discussions around storing a version of this tool in the dpdk tree to avoid developers using one version while the automated tools use another, or even so that all developers are using the same version at any given time?   It has always been my experience that it is better to version control as many of the dependent tools as possible to ensure repeatable and predictable results.   If storing a version of the script in the dpdk tree is unacceptable then perhaps automatically downloading a copy from kernel.org at runtime would be better?

Yes it has been discussed few times.
I don't see any issue at having different results, because the main benefit
of checkpatch is to help in reviews. If a new tool or version helps to have
a better code, it's fine but it is probably not a big issue.
I do not like the idea of saving a copy of checkpatch in DPDK (we won't
maintain it and it could be used by several DPDK repositories).
I think we can add an automatic download from kernel.org if the script
is not found. However it won't fix the versioning.