Re: [PATCH] Avoid C++ comments, use C comments instead

From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jul 11, 2006, 00:15 UTC
Message-ID: <20060711001504.GA10700@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060710235122.GB26528@dspnet.fr.eu.org>

Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 02:25:44AM +0300, Yakov Lerner wrote:
> > I am writing in order to ask, whether there maybe
> > some c99-to-c89 source convertor that can be
> > automatically applied to the .c before compiling with
> > pre-c99 compiler ?
> 
> Comments are easy.  Moving declarations without breaking initializers
> is harder.  Rewriting the struct initializers is pretty much
> impossible without the tool turning into a full-blown C parser.
> 
> Maybe git can be perfectly happy with c89.  I don't know.  I know the
> linux kernel requires c99, mostly for the struct initializers.  My
> point was that staying at the c89 level has a maintainance cost, and a
> cost/benefit analysis should be done to decide whether it is a good
> idea.  Answering "get a C compiler", as is being done for some years
> now for people not wanting prototypes, is an option not to neglect.

GIT 1.2.3 had a lot more struct initializers than GIT 1.4.1 has. So apparently it was cleaner to remove a few of them in some cases then it was to keep them in. But that's besides the point.

I can understand the core maintainers not wanting to apply my patch and lose the benefits of c99, and if I have to I'll carry a private branch with that patch and hand-edit future versions as necessary to get the same result... but I'd hate to see another user have to do the same work for the same reason.

I'm not a big contributor to GIT (I certainly don't contribute nearly as much code as most others) and I'm also not a big user of GIT (I don't develop for the Linux kernel) so I not expecting the core to drop to c89 just for me and this old compiler. :-)

After reading this thread I'm thinking that this probably shouldn't get merged in and that I should carry the tweaks locally to get GIT to build on the only compiler I have available on that system. Now that GIT 1.4.1 is installed on there I'm unlikely to upgrade it for at least 6 months, as I'm using only the very low level plumbing (git-read-tree, git-write-tree, git-update-index, git-repack). Remerging these c99 downgrades at that time shouldn't be a huge issue for me since its probably going to be done so infrequently.

-- 
Shawn.