[pacman-dev] Style questions and concerns

[Dan McGee]

I've noticed these things a lot in recent patches, so let the
discussion commence.

1) typedef-ed structs. This is just a "copy the rest of them" habit,
but I really feel we should stop doing this, only typedef-ing when we
are making a public-facing type that we don't want to expose the
internal contents of. Everything else should remain a struct type, and
referred to as such, no typedef and no confusion that the fields are
accessible.
2) return(value) style. This is a rule set in stone in the coding
style doc but people are continuously breaking it. To be fair, it is
silly, but mixing styles sucks way worse. I propose switching this,
*BUT* all current patches need to follow current style, and if we
switch, it should happen post-3.5.0 and in one commit, not this
piecemeal junk.
3) C99. Several patches are introducing things that go further down
this road. I don't think they should all be avoided but I'm not sure
GCC 3.X (Cygwin is still on this?) supports all of these.
   * Variable declarations not at the start of a block. I'm not a huge
fan of this, as I think having them at the start of the block helps
clarify scope a lot better.
   * Dynamically sized array declarations, e.g. data[numcpus]. I think
this needs to be avoided, unfortunately, but it isn't hard to just use
MALLOC/FREE in this case.
   * C99 structure initialization (saw it in the parallelize patches).

Please chip in and discuss.

-Dan