Re: function prototype element ordering

[Joe Perches]

On Wed, 2021-09-22 at 14:15 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 12:24 AM Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > Attributes should be on their own line, they can be quite lengthy.
> 
> No, no no. They really shouldn't.
> 
> First off, no normal code should use that "__attribute__(())" syntax
> anyway. It's ugly and big, and many of the attributes are
> compiler-specific anyway.
> 
> So the "quite lengthy" argument is bogus, because the actual names you
> should use are things like "__packed" or "__pure" or "__user" etc.
> 
> But the "on their own line" is complete garbage to begin with. That
> will NEVER be a kernel rule. We should never have a rule that assumes
> things are so long that they need to be on multiple lines.

I think it's not so much that lines are long, it's more that the
information provided by these markings aren't particularly useful to
a caller/user of a function.

Under what circumstance is a marking like __pure/__cold or __section
useful to someone that just wants to call a particular function?

A secondary reason why these should be separate or at least put
at the begining of a function declaration is compatibility with
existing tools like ctags.