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SubjectRe: Trailing periods in kernel messages
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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