Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/3] net/netfilter: Convert printk uses to pr_<level>

From: Patrick McHardy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:45:15 +0200

Joe Perches wrote:
> Remove function names from format strings
> Add #define pr_fmt(fmt) "%s:%s: " fmt, KBUILD_MODNAME, __func__

In my opinion a lot of the debugging messages should simply be
removed, they provide little informational value and decrease
readability of the code. Unfortunately I couldn't convince
everyone of that.

>  #ifdef CONFIG_NF_CT_ACCT
> -	printk(KERN_WARNING "CONFIG_NF_CT_ACCT is deprecated and will be removed soon. Please use\n");
> -		printk(KERN_WARNING "nf_conntrack.acct=1 kernel parameter, acct=1 nf_conntrack module option or\n");
> -		printk(KERN_WARNING "sysctl net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_acct=1 to enable it.\n");
> +		pr_warning("CONFIG_NF_CT_ACCT is deprecated and will be removed soon.\n");
> +		pr_warning("Please use nf_conntrack.acct=1 kernel parameter, acct=1 nf_conntrack\n");
> +		pr_warning("module option or sysctl net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_acct=1 to enable it.\n");

For non-debugging messages that should provide enough information
to make sense of them without function names, this change does not
make much sense in my opinion.

Instead of a half-way readable message, we now would get:

nf_conntrack: nf_conntrack_acct_init: CONFIG_NF_CT_ACCT is deprecated ...

which is not an improvement at all. So unless we can limit this
to debugging message, I'll pass on this change.