Your suggestion is a nice one and it would avoid the breakage. However
as a means to inform driver writers that they might be interested in
implementing such an important operation as flush, it doesn't do that.
An announcement on the list would be lost in the noise.
There is a compromise that might satisfy everyone though.
How about this?
1. Use the GCC member initialiser syntax if you want in your
own drivers. It's nice and clear.
(Caveat to C++ driver writers: Back in GCC 2.7.2.1 it _ignored_
the names in C++, with no warning. I don't know if that still
applies).
2. When an _important_ operation is added that driver writers should
take not of, like flush, it should be explicitly added to all
the ops initialisers by name if necessary. It isn't necessary to
compile, it just informs authors that something is new and they
ought to consider implementing it.
This way, there will still be NULL members in ops initialisers,
indicating that a driver doesn't implement some _important_ operation.
-- Jamie
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