[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Please vote!

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear diary, on Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 04:45:01PM CET, I got a letter, where
Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> told me, that...
> > Note, most people will follow the spirit of general coding guidelines but
> > really dislike petty rules, fixups or someone else breaking their code.
> > Over the long haul, the codebase will move to the norm if you just loosen
> > up and let people do their own thing with the review suggestions giving a
> > chance to redirect, and the occasional rejected patch for real abuse
> > teaching people not to be sloppy or stray too far.
> 
> I general: the style guide is not primary for "normal" patches but for "style
> cleanup" patches. I want to avoid a situation where author A submits a patch
> which changes "return(a)" to "return a" (the patch will be applied) and 2
> months later another author B submitts a patch which reverts this change. All
> because of "it looks better this way". There has to be a rule for this.
> Either there is freedom (like now) where no form is prefered (and no patch
> which changes the form will be accepted) or there is exactly one form (this
> doesn't have to be the best one (there are always objectations to this one
> choosen form)).
Yes, but I wouldn't be so pedantic, and if it doesn't really violate the rules
a lot, I would accept it anyway. General rule should be that 'it is reasonably
readable', that means the code is understandable. Then someone else who is
unhappy with minor violence with the rules may go and clean it up even more,
however this can do nearly anybody then, when he knows what the code does and
it's sufficiently commented. The guys who are actually able to decrypt the code
and convert it to *anything* understandable aren't very frequent here, so they
should be really used to decrypting the code, and not to spend their time with
useless complaints and arguing about "if (bla ||\n vs. if (bla\n ||". Once the
code is readable, everyone can do that. Not everyone can be able to get the
code into readable state.

-- 

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis

UN*X programmer, UN*X administrator, hobbies = IPv6, IRC, FreeCiv hacking
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