On Fri, 25 Apr 2014, Javier Martinez Canillas wrote: > 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.
Making this kind of frequent change is a perfectly reasonable, indeed intended, use of Coccinelle. julia > 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 > _______________________________________________ Cocci mailing list Cocci@systeme.lip6.fr https://systeme.lip6.fr/mailman/listinfo/cocci
