Re: [RFC] CodingGuidelines: mark external declarations with "extern"

Denton Liu [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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.