doc/sparse.txt

This document describes how to use the sparse source code checking tool
to check the source code of the open source XFS commands and utilites
("xfsprogs").

First you need to install sparse, either from your distribution or from
source as provided at http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/devel/sparse/.

To simply build the xfsprogs source code while checking the source using
sparse just set the compiler to cgcc, which is a wrapper that calls both
sparse and gcc using:

	CC=cgcc ./configure

Now that default warnings from sparse are a little bit verbose checking
for various not that important things and also complaining about the
glibc system headers.  It does however not check for bitwise annotation
which are very important for xfsprogs to verify the endianess handling
of the on-disk structures is correct.  To get a more reasonable set
of warnings build xfsprogs using:

	LCFLAGS="-Wbitwise -Wno-transparent-union -Wno-old-initializer -Wno-decl" make

You are of course free to experiment with the warnings flags documented
in the sparse manpage to check xfsprogs for other issues.