On Fri, 6 Nov 2020 at 16:08, Markus Armbruster <arm...@redhat.com> wrote: > Peter Maydell <peter.mayd...@linaro.org> writes: > > Personally I just don't think checkpatch should be nudging people > > into folding 85-character lines, especially when there are > > multiple very similar lines in a row and only one would get > > folded, eg the prototypes in target/arm/helper.h -- some of > > these just edge beyond 80 characters and I think wrapping them > > is clearly worse for readability. > > The warning's intent is "are you sure this line is better not broken?" > The problem is people treating it as an order that absolves them from > using good judgement instead. > > I propose to fix it by phrasing the warning more clearly. Instead of > > WARNING: line over 80 characters > > we could say > > WARNING: line over 80 characters > Please examine the line, and use your judgement to decide whether > it should be broken.
I would suggest that for a line over 80 characters and less than 85 characters, the answer is going to be "better not broken" a pretty high percentage of the time; that is, the warning has too many false positives, and we should tune it to have fewer. And the lure of "produce no warnings" is a strong one, so we should be at least cautious about what our tooling is nudging us into doing. thanks -- PMM
