On the initialization of structures

The kernel source contains a great many structures which are initialized at compile time. Back in the 2.3 development series, substantial effort went into converting all of those initializations into the gcc designated initialization format:

    struct something my_struct = {
	field_1:    value,
	field_2:    value,
	...
    };

The advantage of this format, of course, is that it is possible to clearly initialize a subset of the structure's fields and not have things break if the declaration of the structure changes. It was a good change which cleaned up a lot of code.

There's only one problem: the C99 standard chose a different format. Standard-compliant C should instead contain initializations that look like:

    struct something my_struct = {
	.field_1 = value,
	.field_2 = value,
	...
    };

After a bit of discussion, the kernel hackers have decided to, you guessed it, convert all of the structure initializations in the kernel to the new format. Those changes are starting to find their way into the mainline; all new code should certainly be done the standard way.

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