[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Documentation, Usability and Development

[Kevin Brown <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Petrus Viljoen <viljoenp@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Kevin Brown wrote:
> 
> > things, after all, so we should use them, yes?).  Most people are
> > perfectly willing to adhere to rules such as the one about formatting,
> > but the more such rules you insist upon, the more quickly they'll
> > decide to work on some other project that isn't so anal.
> >
> 
> Don't agree with you .
> 
> If you don't lay down the rules (Personality of this project) you will get a
> mishmash of coding styles naming conventions etc.. Making it more difficult to
> to understand the source and structure  of the project.

I agree regarding naming conventions and other such things that
require manual control.  But I was referring to actual formatting of
the code, and I've seen far too many criticisms of subtle formatting
changes here on the list to believe that it isn't important to some of
the key players here.

And yet, formatting of the code is something that can be dealt with
automatically by the CVS maintainers.  The only initial work involves
marking the sections of the code that indent should leave alone (most
of those sections will be comments).

> Personally I think the source  in FreeCiv is in a very good shape. Easy to
> understand & read.
> And this is because of strict adherence to some simple rules.

I agree to some extent.  Remember the tradeoff, though: fewer
contributors.  How many people would contribute but don't because
they're put off by the strict rules regarding the source code?
Shouldn't maintenance of the appearance of the code be left to those
who actually care about it?  There's nothing wrong with someone
submitting a patch, getting it approved for inclusion in CVS, and then
someone else who cares about the formatting fixing the patch so that
it adheres to the conventions.

-- 
Kevin Brown                                           kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    It's really hard to define what "unexpected behavior" means when you're
                       talking about Windows.