Drawbacks of using declarations/namespace aliases (was: [Libreoffice-commits] rtl:: prefix removal from configmgr)

[Lubos Lunak]

On Tuesday 11 of December 2012, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> > commit 3e64874e7cd234ff563ac11450cfb2b6e2db4bf6
> > Author: Radu Ioan <ioan.radu.g at gmail.com>
> > --- a/configmgr/source/access.hxx
> > +++ b/configmgr/source/access.hxx
> > @@ -82,7 +82,6 @@ namespace com { namespace sun { namespace star {
> >       }
> >       namespace util { struct ElementChange; }
> >   } } }
> > -namespace rtl { class OUString; }
>
> Changes like this are, strictly speaking, unsound.  They rely on at
> least one of the included headers happening to in turn include
> rtl/ustring.hxx.

 Which, practically speaking, is pretty much guaranteed to happen for 
OUString.

> The underlying intransparency wrt forward declarations is IMO a
> fundamental drawback of the recent efforts of beautification via using
> declarations or namespace aliases, for rtl and com::sun::star.

 I don't understand what fundamental drawback you mean.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak at suse.cz