Re: dfa.c fix for C89 compilers

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake wrote:

> On 03/31/2010 08:48 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Thanks, but I have to refuse such changes, especially in the likes
>> of dfa.c.  They decrease readability.  It is already too complex,
>> and as soon as grep stabilizes (i.e. goes a week or so without a new bug
>> report) I plan to move many more declarations "down", along with other
>> clean-up and maintainability- and readability-improving changes.
>
> Jim, your statements hold true for coreutils and grep directly.  But I
> recall that gnulib still aims for C89 compilation out-of-the-box, and
> isn't the intent to move dfa.c into gnulib, at which point, a patch like
> this would be important?

dfa.c will not move to gnulib immediately.
In the mean time I don't want to be encumbered by restrictions
or the obligation to maintain a c99-to-c89 patch.

Let's revisit this when dfa.c has reached a fixed point.

Most of gnulib code is pretty well modularized,
so this isn't much of an issue there (notable exceptions
like fts.c are still hard to read).  Maybe by the time
dfa.c is ready, gnulib's policy will permit at least
C89+declaration-after-stmt.