Re: [PATCH v1] devtools: allow variable declaration inside for loop

[Ferruh Yigit <ferruh.yigit@amd.com>]

On 5/3/2023 11:02 AM, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 10:50:18AM +0100, Ferruh Yigit wrote:
>> Declaring variable inside for loop is not supported via C89 and it was
>> checked in checkpatch.sh via commit [1].  But as DPDK supported C
>> standard is becoming C99 [2], declaring variable inside loop can be
>> allowed.
>>
>> [1] Commit 43e73483a4b8 ("devtools: forbid variable declaration inside
>> for")
>>
>> [2] https://dpdk.org/patch/121912
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Ferruh Yigit <ferruh.yigit@amd.com> --- Cc: Bruce
>> Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com> Cc: David Marchand
>> <david.marchand@redhat.com> --- devtools/checkpatches.sh | 8 -------- 1
>> file changed, 8 deletions(-)
>>
> 
> Definite +1 from me for allowing this. However, is the plan still to move
> to C99 in this release. I thought we were just going to jump to C11 in
> 23.11 release? However, I can't see any compilers refusing this if we do
> relax things a bit now.

I will update the commit log for target as C99/C11 .

> 
> I was thinking that our coding standards doc might need an update for this,
> but I don't see the restriction on not doing this documented there, so it
> seems no doc change is necessary.
> 

Commit 43e73483a4b8 refers to following document:

http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/contributing/coding_style.html#local-variables

Which has: "Variables should be declared at the start of a block of code
rather than in the middle."

Although it is comparing between declaring start of a block and middle
of the code, maybe we can update the document to explicitly state that
declaring variable inside for loop is allowed to prevent confusion.

Let me send a new version with documentation update.