[PATCH] CodingGuidelines: give deadline for "for (int i = 0; ..."

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 31, 2022, 00:09 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqy20r3rv7.fsf@gitster.g>

We raised the weather balloon to see if we can allow the construct in 44ba10d6 (revision: use C99 declaration of variable in for() loop, 2021-11-14), which was shipped as a part of Git v2.35. Document that fact in the coding guidelines, and more importantly, give ourselves a deadline to revisit and update.

Let's declare that we will officially adopt the variable declaration in the initializaiton part of "for ()" statement this winter, unless we find that a platform we care about does not grok it.

A separate weather balloon for C99 as a whole was raised separately in 7bc341e2 (git-compat-util: add a test balloon for C99 support, 2021-12-01). Hopefully, as we find out that all C99 features are OK on all platforms we care about, we can stop probing the features we want one-by-one like this (it does not necessarily mean that we would automatically start using any and all C99 language features, though).

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
---
 Documentation/CodingGuidelines | 5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
index 0e27b5395d..f0475c1770 100644
--- a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
+++ b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
@@ -217,7 +217,10 @@ For C programs:
    the first statement (i.e. -Wdeclaration-after-statement).
 
  - Declaring a variable in the for loop "for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)"
-   is still not allowed in this codebase.
+   is still not allowed in this codebase.  We are in the process of
+   allowing it by waiting to see that 44ba10d6 (revision: use C99
+   declaration of variable in for() loop, 2021-11-14) does not get
+   complaints.  Let's revisit this around November 2022.
 
  - NULL pointers shall be written as NULL, not as 0.

-- 
2.35.1-898-ge9d02b9944