lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2007]   [Jun]   [14]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
SubjectRe: [RFC/PATCH] Documentation of kernel messages
From
Date
On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 11:41 +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > Your proposal is similar to one I made to some Japanese developers
> > earlier this year. I was more modest, proposing that we
> >
> > - add an enhanced printk
> >
> > xxprintk(msgid, KERN_ERR "some text %d\n", some_number);
> Maybe a stupid idea but why do we want to assign these numbers by hand?
> I can imagine it could introduce collisions when merging tons of patches
> with new messages... Wouldn't it be better to compute say, 8-byte hash
> from the message and use it as it's identifier? We could do this
> automagically at compile time.

Of course automatically generated message numbers would be great and
something like:

hub.4a5bcd77: Detected some problem.

looks acceptable for me.

We could generate the hash using the format string of the printk. Since
we specify the format string also in KMSG_DOC, the hash for the
KMSG_DOC and the printk should match and we have the required link
between printk and description.

So technically that's probably doable.

Problems are:

* hashes are not unique
* We need an additional preprocessor step
* The might be people, who find 8 character hash values ugly in printks

The big advantage is, that we do not need to maintain message numbers.

> I know it also has it's problems - you
> fix a spelling and the message gets a different id and you have to
> update translation/documentation catalogue but maybe that could be
> solved too...

Since in our approach the message catalog is created automatically for
exactly one kernel and the message catalog belongs therefore to exactly
one kernel, I think the problem of changing error numbers is not too
big.

Michael

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2007-06-14 12:45    [W:0.251 / U:0.288 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site