Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:15:32 -0800 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: Trailing periods in kernel messages |
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On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:43:33 +0100 Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> wrote:
> On Thursday 20 December 2007, Alan Cox wrote: > > The kernel printk messages are sentences. > > I'm afraid that I completely and utterly disagree. Kernel messages are _not_ > sentences. The vast majority is not well-formed and does not contain any of > the elements that are required for a proper sentence. > > The most kernel messages can be compared to is a rather diverse and sloppy > enumeration. And enumerations follow completely different rules than > sentences. It can better be characterized as a "semi-random sequence of > context-sensitive technical messages". > > IMHO the existing rule that "Kernel messages do not have to be terminated > with a period." is completely justified, though it does need some minor > clarification on the cases in which proper punctuation _should_ be > followed.
No-period is a kernel idiom, produces perfectly readable output, I have never ever heard of anyone expressing the least concern over a lack of dots at the end of their printks and 91% of kernel code agrees.
otoh the place where no-dots comes horridly unstuck is if a single printk contains two sentences:
printk("My computer caught on fire. I hope yours does too\n");
that's really daft. It's very rare though.
Of course one could always patch syslogd to add the dots, or change printk and add an i_am_anal=1 kernel boot option.
Andy, please have an accident with that checkpatch change and let's hope like hell that nobody starts trying to "fix" any of this.
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