Hello Markus, On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 4:30 PM, SF Markus Elfring <elfr...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote: >> I was wondering if the change I'm doing manually could be automated by >> using cocinelle but I've no experience neither writing semantic >> patches nor the SmPL language grammar. > > I would like to point out a general consideration. > > Semantic patches can be developed for some use cases. I find that > corresponding efforts are only useful if such a generalised patch can be > applied to a source code base several times. > I doubt that you want to try it out for a single source code adjustment. > It might be that a need will appear to perform a transformation once > more a bit later, doesn't it? >
Thanks a lot for your feedback. I understand the the primary use for cocinelle could be to have generalized patches that can detect common semantic errors to have a flexible and extensible static analysis. In this case I'm interested in a different use case though. I'm doing a kernel wide change on a core API used by a lot of drivers (~250) so is a lot of work to do this manually and I can miss a driver when grepping the code. And even if I manage to do all the manual changes (I've already changed a bunch of them), I don't have cross-compiler to at least build test the drivers for every single architecture to find out if I made a silly programming mistake. So I think that it is much safer to express the change as a semantic patch even if the change is going to be made only once, in order to avoid introducing any build regressions. Best regards, Javier _______________________________________________ Cocci mailing list Cocci@systeme.lip6.fr https://systeme.lip6.fr/mailman/listinfo/cocci
