On Tue, 27 Oct 2020, t...@redhat.com wrote:
> This rfc will describe > An upcoming treewide cleanup. > How clang tooling was used to programatically do the clean up. > Solicit opinions on how to generally use clang tooling. > This tooling is very impressive. It makes possible an idea that I had a while ago, to help make code review more efficient. It works like this. Suppose a patch, p, is the difference between the new tree, n, and the old tree, o. That is, p = n - o. Now let clang-tidy be the transformation 't'. This gets you a much more readable patch submission, P = t(n) - t(o). The only difficulty is that, if I submit P intead of p then 'git am' will probably reject it. This is solved by a little tooling around git, such that, should a patch P fail to apply, the relevant files are automatically reformatted with the officially endorsed transformation t, to generate a minimal cleanup patch, such that P can be automatically applied on top. If the patch submission process required* that every patch submission was generated like P and not like p, it would immediately eliminate all clean-up patches from the workload of all reviewers, and also make the reviewers' job easier because all submissions are now formatted correctly, and also avoid time lost to round-trips, such as, "you can have a reviewed-by if you respin to fix some minor style issues". * Enforcing this, e.g. with checkpatch, is slightly more complicated, but it works the same way: generate a minimal cleanup patch for the relevant files, apply the patch-to-be-submitted, and finally confirm that the modified files are unchanged under t.
