[systemd-devel] [HEADS-UP] It's release time!

[Uoti Urpala]

On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 02:03 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 20.02.14 01:21, Uoti Urpala (uoti.urpala at pp1.inet.fi) wrote:
> > Even if there can be reasonable style disagreements about exactly where
> > to use mixed declarations, at least some uses of them are certainly
> > beneficial. It's only a matter of getting used to reading them if you've
> > only read old-style code before. I'm sure that if C had had mixed
> > declarations from the beginning, nobody would come up with a coding
> > style which declared that particular feature to be harmful.
> > 
> > Given systemd's approach to features, I think it's pretty ironic if its
> > coding style has a "you can't expect me to get used to new features"
> > attitude to something that's been used for more than a decade.
> 
> Oh, it's really not like that. We make use of a lot of newer language
> features all the time. We have have a lot of gccisms in our code, such
> as the gcc cleanup attribute. And there's already C11 bits in the code,
> too.

I know that some other new features are used. However, I don't believe
that the underlying reason behind opposing mixed declarations would be
anything other than being used to lack of it and opposing change.

>  However, there are certain language features that we consider
> obvious improvements and there are others where we are a lot more
> conservative.
> 
> It's a matter of taste I figure, it's like tabs vs. spaces. We don't
> allow tabs either in our sources... And neither do we allow declaration
> after statements...

For indentation style, you have to pick _something_ anyway. But you
don't have to randomly forbid some normal language features, and the
only reason for people to have such a "taste" is being used to old-style
sources. There is no reason why people would pick out mixed declarations
in particular as something to oppose if it was not a newer feature.

If C had had mixed declarations from the beginning, but not the "->"
operator, we might have people who are fine mixed declarations but
insist that people write (*p).x instead of p->x. Nobody has such a taste
now when they haven't become familiar with sources using only such
style.

> We are apparently not alone on this btw, after all gcc *does* have this
> warning flag support even in C99 and C11 mode...

Yes, there are people who still want to avoid that. I think they're
quite similar to the people who insist that systemd must be only harmful
as sysvinit has worked fine for them 20+ years. That's the reason for my
comment about irony above.