On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 09:41:55AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Note that gcc rules for __attribute__() (and that's the only source > > of rules we _have_ for the damn thing) clearly say that > > int __user *p; > > is the same thing as > > int *__user p; > > Quick question: is there some reason why we have to honor the crazy gcc > rules, and cannot try to convince gcc people that they are insane? AFAICS, they started with storage-class-like attributes. Consider e.g. always_inline or section; these are not qualifiers at all and you want to have static __attribute__((always_inline)) int foo(int *p); interpreted with attribute applied to foo, not to its return type. So they have fsckloads of existing code relying on that parsing. BTW, they want things like int *p __attribute__((section(...))) and that's a position where qualifiers just do not appear. Again, existing codebase (and quite a bit of that is present in the kernel, BTW). I rather doubt that they'll be able to kill that off and making parsing dependent on the nature of attribute is not a viable option either - think of __attribute__((this,that)) where "this" is storage-class-like and "that" - qualifier-like. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-sparse" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
