Thread: perlcritic: Missing "return"
After applying the perlcritic overrides Andrew used for the buildfarm, one of the most common remaining level 4 warnings in the PostgreSQL source, with 186 occurrences, is 'Subroutine does not end with "return"'.
The point of this warning is that, in Perl, falling off the end of a subroutine returns the result of the last statement. Therefor one should explicitly 'return;' to make it clear the caller is not expecting that result as the return value.
I believe Andrew took the approach of adding return at the end of all functions for the buildfarm code. Would the project prefer the same? The other option would be disable the warning, based on a policy of always explicitly using 'return' when returning a value.
Thoughts?
Mike B
On 05/11/2018 09:59 AM, Mike Blackwell wrote: > After applying the perlcritic overrides Andrew used for the buildfarm, > one of the most common remaining level 4 warnings in the PostgreSQL > source, with 186 occurrences, is 'Subroutine does not end with "return"'. > > The point of this warning is that, in Perl, falling off the end of a > subroutine returns the result of the last statement. Therefor one > should explicitly 'return;' to make it clear the caller is not > expecting that result as the return value. > > I believe Andrew took the approach of adding return at the end of all > functions for the buildfarm code. Would the project prefer the same? > The other option would be disable the warning, based on a policy of > always explicitly using 'return' when returning a value. > > Thoughts? > > Part of the reasoning behind this perlcritic policy is that falling off the end of a function can leak information. That's why I went and cleaned it up in the buildfarm code. I don't have terribly strong feelings either way, but if Mike wants to do the leg work then I favor accepting a patch to clean this up. cheers andrew -- Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services