Re: Building 100 kernels; we suck at dependencies and drown in warnings

["Jesper Juhl" <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>]

On 2/26/06, Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 06:29:54PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> > On 2/26/06, Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:
> >...
> > > > >From 100 kernel builds there was a total of 16152 warnings and 645 of those
> > > > are unique warnings, the rest are duplicates.
> > > >
> > > > We are drowning in warnings people. Sure, many of the warnings are due to
> > > > gcc getting something wrong and shouldn't really be emitted, but a lot of
> > > > them point to actual problems or deficiencies (I obviously haven't looked
> > > > at them all in detail yet, so take that with a grain of salt please).
> > > >...
> > >
> > > It's well-known that BROKEN_ON_SMP drivers often spit 50 warnings in one
> > > warning. If you remove the dozen worst drivers the numbers should look
> > > much better.
> > >
> > Better yet, let's fix the warnings.
>
> It's never bad if someone converts drivers still using cli/sti.
>
> Unfortunately, this is non-trivial...
>
> > > Not that our current situation was perfect, but the number of warnings
> > > in .config's people usually use isn't that bad.
> >
> > I agree it's not too bad for most people. The point of my post was
> > mostly a "call to arms" trying to get people interrested in fixing all
> > the warnings and build errors we have.
>
> I'm agreeing that this is a good idea, I simply disagreed with your
> "we suck at..." point, since although we can become better we aren't
> that bad.
>
Ok, maybe that was a bit too stong wording.


> > There's a lot of focus on implementing new features - and that's great
> > - but there's little emphasis on fixing the problems we have and
> > already know about - I'd like to see that change, and my post was
> > mainly an attempt at making that happen :)
>
> IMHO, the real problems we already know about are not warnings, they are
> the ones listed at
>   http://bugzilla.kernel.org/
>
> And in these cases, the bugs in unmaintained areas of the kernel like
> APM or the floppy driver are the worst ones.
>

Agreed, those bugs should be fixed as well. Unfortunately most of them
are beyond my abilities, so I tend to focus on the stuff that I see is
broken and that I am actually able to help fix.  :-)


--
Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
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