> 80 columns is simply silly when dealing with either > long identifiers or many levels of indentation. > > One thing that 80 column limit does do is encourage > shorter identifiers and fewer levels of indentation. > > Generally, both of those are good things.
I think the main complaint with the limit is that people fix it by simply breaking the long line, which often makes for less readable code. Perhaps there would be less pushback on this if checkpatch also complained about clumsily broken long lines and offered the advice to restructure the code with helper functions etc. to avoid deep indentation? FWIW I do find checkpatch is helpful enough with useful tips that it has value even when it generates some noise. Generally the better you are at conforming to kernel style, the more irritating it will be, because you only see the questionable output. For newbies, and less frequent contributors (especially those who work on other projects with other style guides) it is likely still doing a good job. In the journey from 4.6 to 4.7 we had 13433 commits. 2258 (16%) from people with 5 or fewer commits in that release. Those are the people most helped by checkpatch (plus the maintainers who took those patches didn't have to spend as many cycles complaining about style). I think the bottom line is whether checkpatch's helpful messages do more good than the grey area messages that cause people to make questionable changes to shut checkpatch up. -Tony