Re: Clarifying confusion of our variable placement rules caused by cleanup.h

[Alexey Dobriyan]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 09:50:29AM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:17:32 +0100
> Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > > There was variation of this type of nonsense with headers (not only it has
> > > to be sorted alphabetically but by length too!)  
> > 
> > By length it indeed sounds weird, but alphabetical is the natural language
> > order everybody learnt from the daycare / school years, so it's properly
> > programmed in our deep brain. Having that allows to find easily if anything one
> > is interested in is already being included. Also it allows to avoid dup inclusions
> > (was there, fixed that for real). So, it's not bad.
> 
> Actually, I like the "by length" because its aesthetically easier on the eyes.
> 
> Alphabetically is fine, but either one helps in catching duplicate headers.

Such rules for headers are mostly harmless -- headers are supposed to be
idempotent so ordering doesn't matter. But if ordering doesn't matter
why have a rule at all?

Duplicate header are trivially caught by tooling.

But such rules aren't useful either -- I've seen that Python IDEs hide
import list by default (and probably manage it) because it is not "real"
code.

Rules for initializers can be harmful because ordering affects code
generation.