Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 6 Aug 2008 14:52:01 +0200 | From | "Vegard Nossum" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] blackfin/sram: use 'unsigned long' for irqflags |
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On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> The patch was generated using the Coccinelle semantic patch framework. >>> >>> spam ? >> >> Hm? I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. Do you think >> the credit is undeserved? > > *shrug* ... i dont see other patches with things like: > The patch was generated with git. > The patch was generated with eclipse. > The patch was generated with emacs. > etc... > > we dont generally list all of the tools in the log message that was > used in *creating* a patch since it doesnt really add any value when > looking back historically at changes.
Hm. I agree that git/eclipse/emacs/etc. information is not very useful. However...
For errors found with lockdep, we usually put either the lockdep output in the commit message or say that it was found with lockdep. Having this information in the log is useful because it also establishes a track record for the tool which was used to discover/fix the error.
Arguably, the semantic patch itself should be present in the log as well. There are different practices here, but in this case, the patch was quite long, and has already been included in a pending commit. Now others may use the same semantic patch (or a variation of it) and possibly find more "bad" code (possibly introduced after the semantic patch was first applied!).
It seems that the practice of including a reference to the tool is already widespread, though, for example:
$ git log v2.6.26-rc2 | grep -ci 'semantic patch' 72
$ git log v2.6.26-rc2 | grep -ci coverity 495
etc.
Vegard
PS: This is a bit of a sore spot for me having been directly involved with the development of another such tool (kmemcheck). I will always ask for kmemcheck to be credited in the log whenever it is used to find and fix genuine programmer errors, simply because that's the best way to measure its usefulness :-)
-- "The animistic metaphor of the bug that maliciously sneaked in while the programmer was not looking is intellectually dishonest as it disguises that the error is the programmer's own creation." -- E. W. Dijkstra, EWD1036
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