Hi Julian,
The reason I was pointing this out was that while foo() doesn't need to know what's in struct bar, it will help type safety and general code cleanliness to have some declaration of struct bar in the headers.
Mostly agree with you. It is cleaner to define all forward declarations in one header file.
If we have a module that exports a set of functions in it's header file (say "bar.h") like: extern struct bar *get_bar(); extern void foo(struct bar *bar); the struct bar is part of the API of the module, even if no caller ever uses it's internals. Therefore the header file should include the line: struct bar; so that users of the API don't have to declare it themselves to suppress the compiler warnings that would be generated otherwise.
Or the header file should include another header file with this declaration.
My objection was to the struct declaration appearing at the top of wl_iw.c, rather than in the header file that defines the functions that use it.
Got it.
In fact, looking a bit further around, it appears that this declaration is already in aiutils.h making it's appearance at the top of wl_iw.c completely redundant, especially given that the file in question appears to not use *any* functions that use the struct, and if it does, it should include aiutils.h rather than declaring the struct itself - and this isn't introducing extra coupling, this is merely including the header that defines the API for the code that actually uses this struct.
I just created a patch that removes all forward struct declarations from .c files. This patch will be part of a future patch set, I have added a 'Reported-by: ' line with your name to the commit message.
Thanks, Roland. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
