[U-Boot] GCC 7.x vs. C++ comments

[Dr. Philipp Tomsich]

> On 9 May 2018, at 15:49, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, May 09, 2018 at 02:46:54PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>> Dear Tom,
>> 
>> In message <20180509114828.GG12235 at bill-the-cat.ec.rr.com> you wrote:
>>> 
>>> We should go and update [1] to note some special exemptions to the rule.
>> 
>> I'm not happy about this.
>> 
>>> I see you missed out on the SPDX thread over here:
>>> https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2018-May/327544.html and repeat
>> 
>> Marek already said what was on my mind, and got ignored.
>> Would it have changed anything if I had posted another complaint?
> 
> Ignored, no.  Counts as a veto?  No.  And if you had chimed in too, I
> don't know if that would have gotten anyone else to also chime in.
> Looking over the thread again there's two yes votes, two no votes, two
> people that chimed in on the thread but didn't express a yes or no to
> the change, and then no one else has said anything.  The main thing I
> see currently is a whole lot of ambivalence.

Although I am ambivalent to the underlying discussion, I have strong
opinions regarding the language/standard-compliance...

My vote goes to C++ comments and upgrading the language standard
to C99 (or rather gnu99, as our code uses extensions).  This will (at least
somewhat) match how the default C compliance level in GCC has evolved
over the GCC 6 through GCC 8 release cycles.

And while we’re at it, we should allow "for (int i = 0; …”-style C99 declaration
of loop iterations within the loop-head.

> 
>> I'm doing now, and apparently I get ignored, too.  So what exactly
>> is your argument?
>> 
>>> myself, I see it as more worthwhile to (a) follow the kernel in this
>>> area (for both tooling and consistency and ease of development for our
>>> overlapping community) (b) save space (in just about every conversion we
>>> went from 2 lines to 1 line).  Thanks!
>> 
>> OK, so you decided, and any additional discussion is futile...
> 
> It's not futile, but here's as best I can tell, the arguments:
> Against Linux Kernel style SPDX tags:
> - Don't like // style comments
> - Visually inconsistent / jarring
> 
> For Linux Kernel style SPDX tags:
> - Has higher visibility.
> - Has tooling to enforce correctly formatted tags.
> - Shorter (enforced as a single line comment means we don't have people
>  spacing around it).
> - Consistent expectations for our overlapping developer community.
> 
> Things that could be taken, without changing overall formatting:
> - Logic operators for exceptions/dual-license/etc
> 
> If people speak up against the change now that we've done it, we could
> revert and then add in the "LICENSE-A OR LICENSE-B" change.  Thanks!
> 
> -- 
> Tom