Denton Liu <liu.denton@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> And I have a strong preference, after thinking about it, to have >> "extern" in front in the declarations. It gives another clue for >> patterns I feed to "git grep" to latch onto, and help my eyes to >> scan and tell decls and defns apart in the output. The benefit >> alone is worth the extra 7 columns in front spent, which you call >> "clutter". > > To be honest, I do not have any preference between having the explicit > extern or not. I do have a strong preference, however, for having a > codebase that's consistently written. When I was doing the refactor, I > wouldn't have minded introducing extern everywhere although that wasn't > suggested as an alternative. > > I agree that these are all benefits of declaring functions explicitly as > extern. However, I don't think they're worth the cost of either another > huge rewrite or an inconsistent codebase. Yes, there is a cost associated with having made a mistake in the past. Biting the bullet now, perhaps as the first tree-wide change immediately after the upcoming release, while the tree is quiescent, would help us in the longer term, than having to live without extern on declarations.
