[Linux-cachefs] Re: [dm-devel] [PATCH v4 00/12] introduce skip_spaces(), reducing code size plus some clean-ups

[André Goddard Rosa]

Hi, James!

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 2:05 PM, James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley at hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-11-07 at 13:16 -0200, André Goddard Rosa wrote:
>> This patch reduces lib.a code size by 173 bytes on my Core 2 with gcc 4.4.1
>> even considering that it exports a newly defined function skip_spaces()
>> to drivers:
>>    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
>>   64867     840     592   66299   102fb (TOTALS-lib.a-before)
>>   64954     584     588   66126   1024e (TOTALS-lib.a-after)
>> and implements some code tidy up.
>>
>> Besides reducing lib.a size, it converts many in-tree drivers to use the
>> newly defined function, which makes another small reduction on kernel size
>> overall when those drivers are used.
>
> Before we embark on something as massive as this, could we take a step
> back.  I agree that if I were coming up with the strstip() interface
> today I probably wouldn't have given it two overloaded uses.
>
> However, I think the function, in spite of this minor issue, is very
> usable.  I still don't understand why people thought adding a
> __must_check, which is what damaged one of the overloaded uses, is a
> good idea.

Differently of "static void strip(char *str)"@scripts/kconfig/conf.c ,
this function
does not moves the characters to the beginning of the string, so that if that
string is going to be reused it should refer to the newly returned string start.

I've changed it to remove the const and return a "char *".

Do you think __must_check is not needed as well?

Thanks,
André