Nobody has suggested making *every* symbol static, only those symbols
which are currently external and are not referenced by name from other
sources. The above example is a valid case where flobble has to be
non-static and does not apply to the real problem.
What Thomas Koenig and I have been complaining about is the ~2,000
external symbols that are not declared as static but neither are they
referenced by name from other sources. The fact that they may be
passed by address to other routines is irrelevant, their name scope is
local no matter what their use scope.
My approach is simple - if there are no external references *by name*
to a non-automatic symbol then that symbol should be static. Restricts
usage checking to the local source, makes it easier to track down the
real usage of the symbol and lets gcc find unused non-automatic
symbols.
As an example, see drivers/scsi/53c7,8xx.c. gcc flags one of the
procedures as unused, it can only do that because the procedure is
correctly defined as static. Comment out that procedure and another
couple of procedures become unused because they are static and their
only reference is from the first unused proc. Result - the removal of
code that is never used and a smaller driver.
We cannot do this with many sources because their procs and global
variables are not defined as static. However *if* they are never
referenced by name from other sources, why are they not defined as
static?
My current report is ftp://ftp.ocs.com.au/pub/extra_externals-2.1.23.gz