Re: [PATCH 01/23] contrib/coccinnelle: add equals-null.cocci

> Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> writes:
>
>> On 30/04/2022 05:13, Elia Pinto wrote:
>>> Add a coccinelle semantic patch necessary to reinforce the git coding style
>>> guideline:
>>>
>>> "Do not explicitly compute an integral value with constant 0 or '\ 0', or a
>> s/compute/compare/
>>> pointer value with constant NULL."
>> If this gets re-rolled, perhaps include a simple example for those who
>> don't immediately understand that quoted sentence. It will also help
>> decode the coccinelle script
>>
>> so:     `if (ptr == NULL)` becomes `if (!ptr)`  etc.
> That is certainly a good suggestion, but I am wondering if we want
> to also emphasize another more generally applicable rule that
> appears much earlier in the guideline document:
>
>  - Fixing style violations while working on a real change as a
>    preparatory clean-up step is good, but otherwise avoid useless code
>    churn for the sake of conforming to the style.
>
>    "Once it _is_ in the tree, it's not really worth the patch noise to
>    go and fix it up."
>    Cf. http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1001.3/01069.html