On 29/01/2019 20:57, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi Uwe,
>
> Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
>> On 1/29/19 2:38 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>
>>> Thoughts of all kinds welcome, as always. If you'd prefer this in the
>>> form of a "git pull"-able repository, a push to salsa, or an NMU, just
>>> ask.
>>
>> I didn't follow sparse development in the nearer past. Is there a
>> problem with sparse 0.5.2 that would be fixed by going to 0.6.0?
>>
>> My thought was not to touch it for buster and go to 0.6.0 only afterwards.
>
> Cc-ing Ramsay Jones and Luc to find out. In [1] I find
>
> | [I was a little surprised that Linux Mint 19.1 (based on Ubuntu
> | 18.04) has v0.5.1 - Debian unstable has v0.5.2, but both of those
> | are just a little too old for use with git on recent Linux.]
>
see, eg. https://marc.info/?l=linux-sparse&m=152668057308589&w=2
et. seq.
> but I wasn't able to reproduce a problem with v0.5.2 analyzing git.git
> myself.
The problem, which was actually due to the version of glibc, appeared
for me when updating to Ubuntu 18.04 (as a test run for Linux Mint 19
;-) ). It was also present in fedora 27, 28 and 29 (I assume also in
Ubuntu 18.10, but I haven't tried that).
> That said, v0.6.0 has been working well for me, so I suspect
> upgrading is not too risky.
>
> One example improvement is
>
> commit fdf8252f312a40df9aa51c6e30c0d07fa29ebd12
> Author: Ramsay Jones <ram...@ramsayjones.plus.com>
> Date: Sun Nov 18 23:52:23 2018 +0000
>
> constant: add -Wconstant-suffix warning
>
> Currently, when used on the kernel, sparse issues a bunch
> of warnings like:
> warning: constant 0x100000000 is so big it is long
>
> These warning are issued when there is a discrepancy
> between the type as indicated by the suffix (or the absence
> of a suffix) and the real type as selected by the type
> suffix *and* the value of the constant.
>
> Since there is nothing incorrect with this discrepancy,
> (no bits are lost) these warnings are more annoying than useful.
> So, make them depending on a new warning flag -Wconstant-suffix
> and make it off by default.
>
Although it mentions the kernel, this was indeed the 'fix' for the
problem on 'newer Linux distros'. (I still think glibc should have
been fixed ... ).
This version also adds many fixes for sparse on cygwin and quite a
few for kernel development. See the release notes on the sparse
wiki (https://sparse.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Sparse_0.6.0_released).
ATB,
Ramsay Jones
