warnings

[Dave Jones]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 11:07:17PM -0600, Ray Lehtiniemi wrote:
 
 >  - crank up the compiler to -W -Wall
 > 
 >  - clean up all the new "easy" warnings
 >    - whatever they are..

I've spent the last few days playing around with sparse & xorg.
A sort-of compiler written by Linus Torvalds, (snapshots here:
 http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/projects/bitkeeper/sparse/)
which outputs lots of warnings about things, but no actual code.

The biggest hurdle to getting it working was getting sparse to
not crash when it met K&R style declarations. The latest snapshots
work, but are still quite noisy, due to these declarations, and
some missing functionality in sparse. Current output is around
22,000 lines of warnings. (It was ~40000 earlier this week)

I fixed up a bunch of the K&R function headers with protoize just to
get sparse to parse them without complaint, and have some patches pending
for whomever is interested post-release.  I've also fixed up
a slew of warnings that sparse outputs, and have patches for those
also.


In addition to these, I ran some grep's for simple programming
mistakes, which turned up a surprising amount.
(Examples at http://diary.codemonkey.org.uk/, See 31st August entry)
Patches for those are in bugzilla.

There's tons of low-hanging fruit for anyone motivated here.
>From experience with the kernel janitor project, I'd suggest just diving
in to some random file, fixing stuff up and posting/filing bugzilla
reports as you go along rather than trying to do a single sweep-n-clear
operation in one go, which usually results in a half dozen people doing
the same thing.

		Dave