[Freeciv-Dev] Re: K&R style (was Re: [PATCH] slight optimisation ...)

[Trent Piepho <xyzzy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > > of comments.  It also says that you can put blocks that you don't want
> > > it to touch between /* *INDENT-OFF* */ and /* *INDENT-ON* */.  Issues
> > > like this can be cleared up with further patches once the indent run
> > > has been committed, for anything that the CVS maintainers miss.
> > 
> > You want to go thought every single line of code making sure that indent
> > actually made it look nicer than what was there before?
> 
> No.  Instead, we apply indent, and then whoever *actually cares about
> it* can submit patches to fix the formatting.  What will actually
> happen is that people will submit such patches as they notice areas
> where the formatting is screwed up.

So you want to mess up the formatting and then have other people go in piece
by piece and fix it up again?  Sounds like a lot of unnecessary work.  

> > Back in 1998 we decided against this, and CVS had just been started
> > up and there was a lot less code.  It would be an even worse idea
> > now.  It's not like not having the exact same indention style is
> > some kind of huge problem.  If half the code had 8 space indents and
> > half had 2 spaces, or half was K&R braces and half had that
> > butt-ugly GNU stair-step style then maybe it would be worth it.
> 
> This is not at all evident by the amount of discussion about
> formatting on the list and the current insistence that patches be
> properly formatted.

I'm not the one who's all anal about patch formatting be just the exact way
they want.  There reason there is so much discussion is because formatting is
one of those holy war things that no one will ever agree on.  It's also an
easy thing to bitch about, because you can just look at some code and tell you
don't like the formatting without thinking about it much.

I'd also like to point out that not one other opensource project has a system
of running indent automatically on every commit.  I think you're just worrying
too much about something that isn't a problem.  The system we came up with
back in the beginning of 1998 when CVS was setup and freeciv only had 3 stars
on linuxberg has worked just fine for a long time.