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Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:33:45 -0800 (PST) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2026 22:33:42 +0300 From: Dan Carpenter To: James Bottomley Cc: Steven Rostedt , Alexey Dobriyan , Andy Shevchenko , ksummit@lists.linux.dev, Dan Williams , linux-kernel Subject: Re: Clarifying confusion of our variable placement rules caused by cleanup.h Message-ID: References: <58fd478f408a34b578ee8d949c5c4b4da4d4f41d.camel@HansenPartnership.com> <7b37e1cb-271e-49fe-a3ee-5443006284e1@p183> <20260102095029.03481f90@gandalf.local.home> <38d7b19f-b6ff-437b-bc88-fa2047ca556a@p183> <20260118110454.4d51a50a@robin> Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: ksummit@lists.linux.dev List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 02:17:30PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > > > 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. > > > > I agree. I still prefer the upside-down x-mas tree approach for > > declaring variables, but obviously if they also get initialized, then > > that trumps aesthetic reasoning. > > How is any of this relevant to a style document? You're quibbling over > individual maintainer foibles which, while they may be deeply held to > you (and obviously are relevant to contributors to your subsystems > because they need to know your foibles), can't be part of our universal > advice because not all maintainers agree (not even on the direction of > the Christmas Tree). > The direction of the Christmas Tree is always upside down. That's a standard in networking and a bunch of other subsystems. Otherwise people don't care. I've seen people who write code in Right Side Up Christmas Tree style but they don't reject code which is in a different order. If you're working across the entire kernel like I do then it's safest to assume Upside Down Christmas Tree is the rule. regards, dan carpenter