Re: [PATCH 0/11] renaming argv_array

From: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Date: Aug 11, 2020, 16:08 UTC
Message-ID: <82991f30-fe37-d6d2-ffd5-8b0878f46c83@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <20200728202124.GA1021264@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Am 28.07.20 um 22:21 schrieb Jeff King:

Show 16 quoted lines

> The argv_array data type has turned out to be useful in our code base,
> but the name isn't very good. From patch 2 of this series:
>
>   The name "argv-array" isn't very good, because it describes what the
>   data type can be used for (program argument arrays), not what it
>   actually is (a dynamically-growing string array that maintains a
>   NULL-terminator invariant). This leads to people being hesitant to use
>   it for other cases where it would actually be a good fit. The existing
>   name is also clunky to use. It's overly long, and the name often leads
>   to saying things like "argv.argv" (i.e., the field names overlap with
>   variable names, since they're describing the use, not the type). Let's
>   give it a more neutral name.
>
> This has bugged me for a while, so I decided to finally fix it. It
> wasn't _too_ painful, though I'm sure there will be a little fallout
> with topics in flight.

Just as this landed in master now, https://lobste.rs/ decided to link to http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2493.pdf, which is a paper about reserved identifiers in C. It contains a nice overview.

Anyway, 7.31 of C11 says: "All external names described below are reserved no matter what headers are included by the program." And 7.31.13 goes on: "Function names that begin with str, mem, or wcs and a lowercase letter may be added to the declarations in the <string.h> header." So the names of the strvec functions are reserved.

Also how about using Coccinelle and patience to reduce the impact of such a change next time? I.e. adding the new thing, providing a semantic patch for converting old code, waiting a reasonable amount of time after the last conversion was necessary and then removing the old thing.

René