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  • From: Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] The Great E-mails: part 5 (Conclusion)
  • Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:46:46 -0500

On Aug 28, Eric Sandall [eric AT sandall.us] wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:03:42 +0200 (CEST)
> Andra?? 'ruskie' Levstik <ruskie AT codemages.net> wrote:
>
> > :2009-08-28T21:03:David Kowis:
> >
> > > Regarding all of the above emails:
> > >
> > > An unnecessary restriction on what the developer must do.
> > >
> > > They write code that conforms to bash, and we have few restrictions,
> > > thus allowing people to do what suits them best. They are the ones
> > > doing the work.
> > >
> > > I see no reason to force additional standards upon them.
> >
> > Agreed
>
> From my discussion with Vlad on IRC that prompted this, I believe he is
> wanting to clean up/modify our current formatting standards. We already
> have some requirements on how our developers write spells and he (and
> others) have changes they would like made. Instead of talking about it
> in IRC where it gets lost I (and others) suggested he bring it up on
> the ML for discussion.

I'm pretty sure people get the reason for posting it. It's still very
unnecessary in my opinion. None of the arguments presented are
particularly technical, they're just cosmetic.

Formatting standards set at the outset by the originator of a project are
fairly easy to establish and have some value; formatting wars started after
the fact never produce progress, they just produce endless arguing or
beauracracy for its own sake. We are not so rich in developers that it
makes sense to add overhead that has no technical necessity behind it and
instead makes us less approachable.

The language we're using allows a lot of different types of formatting, but
many would consider that a feature. Bash is equally trivial to read
regardless of if things have one space or two. People can tell what
they're looking at and they can edit it as it is. Further, shell quoting
is squirrely enough about some things that people need freedom to quote in
the style that they best comprehend, or we're more likely to see bugs show
up when they have to try to stick to quoting rules they don't fully
understand.

Forcing everything to comply with an arbitrary standard just to make things
consistent is not the best use of anyone's time, nor is it something the
majority has ever supported enough to support an argument one person
bothered by what's there should go do the work to change it all, since
changing it all tends to frustrate more than it satisfies. We have been
down that path before, at least once in email.

> Some of his suggestions are to add requirements, others are to remove
> requirements (e.g. remove the spacing requrement in DEPENDS for trailing
> "\" and "&&" as shown in http://www.sourcemage.org/DEPENDS, before the
> current wiki mangled the formatting).

Examples that are given in one convention do not make a standard, either
explicit or implied. There is no spacing requirement stated there, nor has
there ever been a hard formatting requirement stated for any file other
than HISTORY, which needs to be machine-readable and therefore has a very
solid technical reason for requiring a specific format. I don't think I've
ever even seen a formal statement that DETAILS needs to center-aligned,
it's just convention. The DETAILS wiki page does say to limit the
descriptions to 80 characters, and apparently has for at least 3 years now.
That also has some kind of technical requirement behind it, since those
fields are routinely directly displayed to users.



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