History question about Base.h and its alternate parallel name space.... Should we change it?

[Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>]

I had some one ask me recently why EFI_GUID does not work with #include <Base.h>. I explained they needed to use GUID vs. EFI_GUID. That prompted the question of why we have 2 names for the same thing..... Well the historical answer was kind of political as some team wanted to use edk2, but not implement EFI. Thus we have EFI types without the EFI_ prefix in Base.h.

So all this got me thinking....  Maybe it makes sense to move some of the renaming from MdePkg/Include/Uefi/UefiBaseType.h to Base.h? Removing the Base.h duplicate types would potentially hit lots of code [1] and break merges with other code bases (break other peoples Base libs etc.).

These lines in MdePkg/Include/Uefi/UefiBaseType.h would get moved to MdePkg/Include/Base.h:
typedef GUID                      EFI_GUID;
typedef RETURN_STATUS             EFI_STATUS;
#define EFIERR(_a)                ENCODE_ERROR(_a)
#define EFI_ERROR(A)              RETURN_ERROR(A)

#define EFI_SUCCESS               RETURN_SUCCESS              
#define EFI_LOAD_ERROR            RETURN_LOAD_ERROR           
#define EFI_INVALID_PARAMETER     RETURN_INVALID_PARAMETER    
#define EFI_UNSUPPORTED           RETURN_UNSUPPORTED          
#define EFI_BAD_BUFFER_SIZE       RETURN_BAD_BUFFER_SIZE      
#define EFI_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL      RETURN_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL     
#define EFI_NOT_READY             RETURN_NOT_READY            
#define EFI_DEVICE_ERROR          RETURN_DEVICE_ERROR         
#define EFI_WRITE_PROTECTED       RETURN_WRITE_PROTECTED      
#define EFI_OUT_OF_RESOURCES      RETURN_OUT_OF_RESOURCES     
#define EFI_VOLUME_CORRUPTED      RETURN_VOLUME_CORRUPTED     
#define EFI_VOLUME_FULL           RETURN_VOLUME_FULL          
#define EFI_NO_MEDIA              RETURN_NO_MEDIA             
#define EFI_MEDIA_CHANGED         RETURN_MEDIA_CHANGED        
#define EFI_NOT_FOUND             RETURN_NOT_FOUND            
#define EFI_ACCESS_DENIED         RETURN_ACCESS_DENIED        
#define EFI_NO_RESPONSE           RETURN_NO_RESPONSE          
#define EFI_NO_MAPPING            RETURN_NO_MAPPING           
#define EFI_TIMEOUT               RETURN_TIMEOUT              
#define EFI_NOT_STARTED           RETURN_NOT_STARTED          
#define EFI_ALREADY_STARTED       RETURN_ALREADY_STARTED      
#define EFI_ABORTED               RETURN_ABORTED              
#define EFI_ICMP_ERROR            RETURN_ICMP_ERROR           
#define EFI_TFTP_ERROR            RETURN_TFTP_ERROR           
#define EFI_PROTOCOL_ERROR        RETURN_PROTOCOL_ERROR       
#define EFI_INCOMPATIBLE_VERSION  RETURN_INCOMPATIBLE_VERSION 
#define EFI_SECURITY_VIOLATION    RETURN_SECURITY_VIOLATION   
#define EFI_CRC_ERROR             RETURN_CRC_ERROR   
#define EFI_END_OF_MEDIA          RETURN_END_OF_MEDIA
#define EFI_END_OF_FILE           RETURN_END_OF_FILE
#define EFI_INVALID_LANGUAGE      RETURN_INVALID_LANGUAGE
#define EFI_COMPROMISED_DATA      RETURN_COMPROMISED_DATA
#define EFI_HTTP_ERROR            RETURN_HTTP_ERROR

#define EFI_WARN_UNKNOWN_GLYPH    RETURN_WARN_UNKNOWN_GLYPH   
#define EFI_WARN_DELETE_FAILURE   RETURN_WARN_DELETE_FAILURE  
#define EFI_WARN_WRITE_FAILURE    RETURN_WARN_WRITE_FAILURE   
#define EFI_WARN_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL RETURN_WARN_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL
#define EFI_WARN_STALE_DATA       RETURN_WARN_STALE_DATA
#define EFI_WARN_FILE_SYSTEM      RETURN_WARN_FILE_SYSTEM

I'm interested what folks think about a change like this? This change makes the alternate names optional. 

I guess we could also leave the old Base.h definitions in Base.h and cleanup the code to only use the EFI form, but that is a much bigger change? 

[1] RETURN_SUCCSS usage: git grep -w RETURN_SUCCESS

Thanks,

Andrew Fish